Followup tab pony?

October 25, 2011 8:40 PM

Could we maybe have a "followup" tab in AskMe?

This may be coding hell, in which case never mind, but:
In my recent question, we had a Very Low Frequency conversation where the answerers, bless them, came back and answered my followup information. But the answerers had to bother to come back and see that I'd provided more info.
Is there a way to automate this? In other words, have a tab that lists questions that I've recently answered, that the original asker has come back with more information?
Any number of times, I've thought to myself, I wonder what happened on that one question, if there was any more (required) infomation provided, or if it was resolved. Having this automated would be a cool feature.

posted by notsnot to Feature Requests at 8:40 PM (14 comments total)

I think I sort of get what you're suggesting but I wonder if Recent Activity wouldn't take care of this? Maybe I'm just someone who uses this waaaay too much, btu I always see even super late updates to questions because they come up in my RA. It may also be that this isn't how other people use the site and it might be worth investigating, but just curious here.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:46 PM on October 25, 2011

This is one of the things that Recent Activity is really great for, actually. Your answerers will see your followup info because the thread pops back up to the top of their RA page. Folks who use RSS to follow individual questions will see new activity in their feed readers as well.

Beyond that, you can add the "stumped" tag to a question if you want to give it a one-time bump on the sidebar of the unanswered tab on the front page of the green; doing that when you provide your late-breaking update might be helpful as well.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:48 PM on October 25, 2011

Yeah, Recent Activity works great for this.
posted by grouse at 8:49 PM on October 25, 2011

I guess I never realized that it bumps up in Recent Activity when the original asker posts a follow up. My concern, obviously, was extra focus if the original asker comes back to the thread.
posted by notsnot at 8:52 PM on October 25, 2011

I was wondering by the way, why "best answers" are not included on our user profiles...
posted by KokuRyu at 10:58 PM on October 25, 2011

I've seen RA follow-up threads that have been open for ages and pop-up to the top of my page.
posted by arcticseal at 11:26 PM on October 25, 2011

KokuRyu: Check this recent thread. Short version: We don't need an uptick in people trying to "win" best answers.
posted by SpiffyRob at 6:17 AM on October 26, 2011

iconomy already won years ago anyway.
posted by cashman at 8:41 AM on October 26, 2011

I guess I never realized that it bumps up in Recent Activity when the original asker posts a follow up.

To be clear, any post in the thread, OP or not, would bump it to the top of Recent Activity for anyone who participated in the thread.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:39 AM on October 26, 2011

KokuRyu: Check this recent thread. Short version: We don't need an uptick in people trying to "win" best answers.

Maybe if more people were striving to give best answers they wouldn't give crappy ones. Granted, there are a low number of crappy answer-givers out there, but they're still around. Not that I necessarily think it should be a stat that gets tracked, however, but I do like to check my percentage from time to time to gauge how helpful I'm being.
posted by phunniemee at 1:06 PM on October 26, 2011

The answer marked best answer is not necessarily the best answer. Some askers mark all answers as best. Many askers never mark a best answer. Some people are motivated to answer everything they find interesting regardless of their ignorance. Some people are motivated to never answer unless the topic is directly relevant to what they do or where they are and they are 100% certain of their answer. Some people will only care about the raw best-answers score and take a shotgun approach to getting it. Some will care only about the best-answer ratio and respond sparingly. Some won't give a rat's ass. And it's not a contest.
posted by ardgedee at 8:21 AM on October 27, 2011

Recent activity is awesome, but sometimes it would be really nice to filter questions with followups in general to see ask metafilter succeeding and occasionally failing. I'm really curious. I'd like a tab too, but perhaps as a mutant half pony it wouldn't be that much work to add a note to the 'resolved' email suggesting a follow up and using followup that as a standard tag if nothing else?
posted by Blasdelb at 4:11 PM on October 27, 2011

The mail currently encourages folks to (a) post followup if relevant and (b) add the "resolved" tag if the question's been resolved. The first bit will kick it up on RA, and the second bit will throw it to the top of the "Resolved" sidebar on Ask's Answered tab. And adding "stumped" will throw it up to the top of the sidebar on the Unanswered tab.

So I feel like there's a lot of coverage for this stuff with the existing toolset for folks who specifically want to watch for either specific questions they've contributed to or questions in general. I dig the desire for some specific extra solution for the between-the-cracks use cases but it seems really pretty fiddly for something that mostly works as it is.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:23 PM on October 27, 2011

Its been a while since I've asked a question, thanks cortex
posted by Blasdelb at 2:35 PM on October 30, 2011