[meta] Recent changes to UnityAnswers

[syclamoth]

UnityAnswers recently went down for a few hours for ‘maintenance’. When it came back online, I found that I could no longer make comments on people’s posts! The ability to contribute in conversations on this site is absolutely core, and I can’t interact with the community without it.

In addition, I seem to have lost the ability to edit (or delete) any posts, including my own- something that can be very frustrating if I’ve made mistakes or want to make a retraction.

It also seems that instead of displaying my username next to my posts, it takes the text from my ‘real name’ field on my profile. While this isn’t really that much of an issue, it’s really extremely unusual behaviour for a site of this kind.

What I’d like to know is, how many of these changes are intentional? Prior to that maintenance cycle, there was a different bug where edits would either fail to apply, or take several hours to appear properly (which was annoying, but not critical)- now, I can’t edit things at all!

As well as that, when I went to the ‘contact’ page to lodge a report, upon submission I was taken to a friendly ‘internal server error’ page- leading me to air my voice publicly, here.

Now, while I’m at it, I may as well say my piece on the moderation queue.

While it’s a good idea to have some kind of filtering system for posts from users who may be spambots or other undesirables, don’t you think it should be ‘innocent until proven guilty’ instead of how it is now? Right now it seems that the site instantly assumes that any user who signs on has bad intentions, which is inconvenient and confusing for new users (often leading to double-posting) as well as time-consuming for the users who have to run through that list several times a day. Why not change it so that instead of the threshold being 15 karma, it only blocks users who are on negative karma? That way, any user who proves that they can’t (or won’t) make decent posts has their contributions filtered, and any normal newbie can speak freely.

As it stands, the moderation queue provides very little benefit to the site. All it does is inconvenience genuine users, and as soon as the spambots notice that comments aren’t filtered at all, doesn’t stop them at all.

[dzone_adm]

Hi there. We’ve tested things and edits appear to be working fine. Can you tell me what browser you’re using? We had to apply a very large number of updates and so it took some time and then had to fine tune it.

Are you still having the issue with not being able to comment or edit? Both of those appear to be working for a large number of people on the site for the last few hours (there were some issues immediately after the update earlier today). As always, we strive for quality and this update was not done as smoothly as we had hoped. If you have any further problems, please contact support@qato.com and we’ll get it resolved ASAP.

[Bunny83]

I have to verify that. The add comment button is missing and there are actually no button at all below posts except the “more” button which just shows the character / word count of the post.

Maybe only the high karma people are affected?

The moderation queue is not that bad, but new users should get informed that their posts have to be verified before they are visible to the public. “innocent until proven guilty” doesn’t work since the spammers can create accounts 20 times faster than you can suspend them. They cross post on several questions before they got detected.

btw. The question title was a link to the question itself, now it’s just plain text. It was quite useful when you followed a link from an e-mail it only showed that single comment / answer and the title-link was the easiest way to visit the actual question page.