A problem-solving contest site for WordPress

[Cais]

One thing I should really have stressed - there will be no scenario of 'bidding down'.

The asker will offer a fixed price when the contest begins, and that price will never change. If someone answers first and the answer suits the asker, he will get paid ASAP, OR, depending on preferences checked, the prize money will be divided among multiple people who answered correctly.

Those points make the concept sound very interesting indeed. I will be looking forward to more details as they are made available.

[dancole]

So when will the client pay? Up front when they ask the question seams the most likely.

What happens if no one answers their question? / Can they retract their question and get their money back, if there are no answers?

Is every single response rated? / What happens when two really good answers are submitted at the same time?

Are the results private / public / selectable?

[JohnM]

@Darren: Are answers publicly available after a contest ?

If not and and the service gets popular, and WP savvy people rather answer there than in WP.org forums, then this project will decrease available WP-knowhow in the WP community, if its publicly available it might increase the available knowhow.

Its the most important question.

[Darren Hoyt]

So when will the client pay? Up front when they ask the question seams the most likely.

Yes, the money is paid upfront so the asker can't get answers for free and then back out of it. If the question isn't answered sufficiently, he can renew the contest, or get his money back, though (I believe) a small fee is charged regardless.

Is every single response rated? / What happens when two really good answers are submitted at the same time?

If the asker has set up the contest to be a stopwatch-style question, the first answerer gets the prize. If he's set it up to be, say, a weeklong contest, multiple people can be awarded for their answers.

If not and and the service gets popular, and WP savvy people rather answer there than in WP.org forums, then this project will decrease available WP-knowhow in the WP community, if its publicly available it might increase the available knowhow.

I'm going to have my friend Lawrence answer this, too, when his WPTavern forum application goes through.

I can see your point, esp in a staunchly open-source community like WP, where documentation is expected to be free and open. I know that Experts Exchange doesn't display the answers to archived questions unless you're a) using the 30 day free trial, or b) purchased a monthly membership. Not sure yet how this part would work.

I would say that if people are frustrated that archived answers aren't visible to them at our site, there's nothing stopping them from asking the same question at the WP forums.

Slightly tangential, but to be honest, I feel like at this point WordPress has been documented within an inch of its life, especially in the past year. Between the codex and the tons of blogs offering tutorials and code samples, there is enough free information available for any novice to learn WordPress with a minimum of research. A lot of us who wrote tutorials a year or two ago have blogged less and less because it's somewhat redundant after awhile. Eventually the game must change, true experts start to shine through, and they won't necessarily want to offer all their coding talents for free.

[jakebarnes]

Hi, all. My name is Lawrence. I'm the other person working on this site, along with Darren.

JohnM, you asked:

If not and and the service gets popular, and WP savvy people rather answer there than in WP.org forums, then this project will decrease available WP-knowhow in the WP community, if its publicly available it might increase the available knowhow.

We were originally thinking that the questions would be public, and making something private (and anonymous) would be something you (the asker) need to pay extra for. Certainly, there will be times when someone, who has a reputation for knowing a lot, has to ask what is an embarrassingly basic question (I've been in that situation, especially first day at a new job). They may want to pay an extra $5 to keep that question private. Private means the question disappears from public view as soon as it is answered.

Or sometimes, you (the asker) need to reveal more about your site than you really want to, so you want the question to disappear from the archives - again, such privacy will cost you something.

Of course, I'm open to adjusting any of these ideas in the face of feedback.

I'm a PHP programmer. I've got a lot of friends who are web designers who work with platforms written in PHP. Most of them can read PHP and they can figure out simple PHP problems, but sometimes they hit a problem and send me a question via email. I'm happy to help them out. A lot of problems are mere syntax issues, which take me all of 60 seconds to fix. Or, as another example, sometimes they are expecting posts to appear in a certain order in a loop, but the order is scrambled, and I look and I see that a loop further up the page is scrambling the results. Simple stuff.

For really big, ambitious sites, with tons of customizations, and $20,000 budgets, the designer will often bring me in to work on the project as part of the team. But for small problems that only need 15 minutes to answer setting up a normal commercial relationship, with monthly invoices and time-tracking software, is just too much hassle. Especially if the designer can handle nearly the whole project herself, save 2 or 3 minor questions about the PHP. I think if there was a site where there were hundreds of such questions I could make a reasonable amount of money answering people's questions.

As I think about this site, I believe I can envision it from both the asker's point of view, and the answerer's point of view. I recall a time in 2004 when it was my first day at a new job and my boss asked me to write a Perl script. I didn't know Perl, but I didn't want to look bad on my first day, so I went to Experts-Exchange and I asked some questions there. I got some reasonably useful responses on that day. I can imagine being an asker on our new site, and I can imagine being an answerer.

Over the years I've used many free forums and newsgroups. I've gotten some useful information from them. However, when the people answering your questions are doing so for free, you kind of have to grovel a bit to get information out of them. You often draw the fire of trolls. Sometimes I've been desperate for some information really fast, and the only response I get from anyone is RTFM! Which is not a helpful response.

Even the smallest payment reverses the social dynamics. Even the smallest payment weeds out the trolls. Because once you are offering money then the answerers have to treat you with the respect that they would treat a client, because that is exactly what you are, in that moment.

I would have thought that as I became more experienced, I'd have less need of sites that can answer my questions. But the opposite is true. I've been doing computer programming for over 10 years now, and I've more questions than ever. I take on bigger projects now, that require me to know many more technologies than any one person could possibly know well. Rather than waste time trying to become an expert in all of those different technologies, I'd rather just pay someone $10 or $20 or $30 to answer a question for me. I imagine the same must be true for a lot of designers: rather than learn everything that a programmer knows, some designers might simply be happy to pay a few bucks to get a quick answer from an expert who has the needed information.

So, we are imagining a site that is useful to both the people asking the questions, and the people answering the questions.

To answer a few of the questions up above:

1.) The asker pays for the question when they create the question. We hold the money.

2.) If the asker disappears and never picks a winner, one of the site administrators (that is Darren or I) will use our best judgement to assign the winner.

3.) The prize for the question is fixed. The asker can increase the amount, but never decrease it.

4.) At the moment our software only allows winner-takes-all awards, but we plan to soon add 60/40 and 30/30/30 splits, for situations where the asker got multiple good answers.

5.) PaulCunningham asked "Is this need not already serviced by the WP jobs listing, and sites like eLance?". We imagine this service being more aimed at problems that need very little time, where eLance would be overkill.

6.) Andrea_r said "You'll have some people working for peanuts". Of course, in most of the existing forums the answerers are answering for free, so peanuts would actually be a step up, in terms of price. Is there a market for our new site, when there are already so many free forums out there? I don't know. I figure we will try it and see.

7.) Andrew_r asked "Can you let me know when it's live?". We hope to have it live by September 1st. Not sure of the domain yet. Check my blog, I will annouce it: http://www.teamlalala.com/blog/

[Jeffro]

All good questions asked so far and overall, I think this idea has some legs. If I were in your situation, I would have thought about all the places and opportunities for people to get this sort of information for free which would have turned me off from the idea so it will be interesting to see how much traction this site gets.

It sounds to me like the site will be setup in such a way that all you'll have to do is manage it. I'm guessing the owner of the site takes some sort of percentage right? Would it be a percentage of the actual listing, or from a successful contest? Also, how is the payments handled? Through an escrow service?

[JohnM]

@Darren/Jake:

Lets say this site gets popular amongst novices, and a popular question is:

How do I remove the admin user and keep the posts ?

Answer: Just create a new user and set it as administrator. Then log in with that new user and delete the “admin” user. Don’t worry if you have many posts written by that user, WordPress will ask whether you want to delete them or re-assign them to a new user

Would the system be set up to answer this question 100 times, or to answer it once and have the question/answers searchable ?

[DannyGSmith]

Say you as ask to have a jQuery plugin created, and your initial price was to low, will there be provisions to increase the bid?

[andrea_r]

I think it was more along the lines of "how do i...? " rather than "I need a plugin".

[jakebarnes]

@johnm asks:

Would the system be set up to answer this question 100 times, or to answer it once and have the question/answers searchable ?

The questions would be public by default. The asker can pay extra to make a question private. I wrote more about that earlier in the thread. Certainly, the site is searchable. For the public questions, we've an internal search using Lucene, and then you can always also use Google.

At the moment, we've no plan to offer the "auto suggest the answer" feature that they have on Stack Overflow, but, as with everything else, once the site is up and running we will be happy to adapt to feedback.

To respond to both dgs and andrea_r - - - actually, I'd be happy if the site also became a site for handling small contracts like a quick jquery plugin. But if that doesn''t happen, that's fine with me too.

dgs, yes, the ability will be there to increase the prize for answering a question.