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I happened to get this question today:

“What is the default file system for Enterprise Linux?”

https://community.spiceworks.com/questions/3990/explanation

There are four years of people commenting that the question needs to be amended and I would imagine that some of those have also down-voted and/or flagged the question before me.

I think 4 years on someone’s “to-do” list is an indication that the process is broken. Do the members of the Spiceworks team have KPIs and is timeliness of dealing with flagged questions one of them?

9 Spice ups
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First off it’s worth remembering that the guys who review the flagged questions are (or certainly were when this question initially was flagged by the looks of it) volunteers, not spiceworks staff, just spiceheads trying to help out. I think there are still some volunteer moderators in the daily challenge systems. So on that basis, it’s unlikely they have KPI’s

Secondly (and this has been the get out clause for, well, forever, the Daily Challenge is in Beta testing, and TBH is unlikely ever to come out of beta testing by the looks of it.

Lastly, it’s a bit of fun, a question has slipped through the net that probably shouldn’t have, cest la vie, there will be another, hopefully better question along tomorrow to brighten your day :slight_smile:

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As I’ve mentioned before, the questions weren’t on our radar for a long time, and only recently were returned to something that we are trying to keep up with… they are still very behind and will take a long time to catch up with.

I have taken this one out of the line-up.

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Curious.

I’ve been a volunteer in a variety of situations and have never used my volunteer status as an excuse not to do my job properly. In my capacity as a volunteer with certain organisations, my KPIs were documented and measured because people were relying on me and if I couldn’t perform my role 100%, they needed to investigate why and fix it, one way or another.

Whether it’s a “bit of fun” is hardly the point and it’s not that a single, solitary “question has slipped through the net that probably shouldn’t have” but that many have and little is being done about it.

And while you might think “Spiceworks is a free service so why be concerned”, it’s actually part of a commercial operation rather than being a not-for-profit. As most people are aware, ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product’, that is, the advertisements that you see and, they hope, you click on can only generate revenue when you come to the site, hence the rationale of encouraging people to come to the site every day. Add to that the hope that Spiceworks has of people sharing their expertise for free and thereby making Spiceworks the “destination of choice” for people with technical issues, and there’s a pretty compelling business case for encouraging users to actively participate on the site - and be the product.

And, yes, Suzanne, you’ve been saying “the questions weren’t on our radar for a long time” - for a long time.

How many questions in the flagged queue?
How many people looking at them?
How many can each person address per day?

It’s a relatively simple equation to work out how many days it will take to get up-to-date, so when do you estimate they will all be addressed? Maybe you could manage my expectation a little better than “will take a long time to catch up”.

This probably sounds a bit demanding but I suppose it depends on whether Spiceworks thinks that it’s doing everyone a favour by being here of if it thinks the people who visit are doing it a favour by coming here.

$0.02

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I don’t have time to count the questions in the flagged queue right now, but there is one person working on them, who is able to work on them perhaps an hour a week at this point, perhaps less. Depends.

I asked the company not to cancel the Daily Challenge program, because I thought it was a good program, and so we are trying, although we are understaffed and overwhelmed with other things.

I don’t think either of those “favor” options. I think the community is mutually beneficial… the company gets something out of it or it wouldn’t be here, and the community members get something out of it, or they wouldn’t be here… and we do the best we can to balance those needs so that everyone benefits.

Unfortunately, I can only do so much. I wish I could take away all of the other things that we have to do and just focus on getting Daily Challenge going, but there are a lot of other priorities. Would you rather I stop writing the Snap, or would you rather that we stop answering private messages and community support tickets? I am trying to get more help, but I can’t just magically make it happen.

If you have individual questions that you want taken out of the mix, please write to community@spiceworks.com and we’ll assign the request a ticket number and take care of it along with all the rest of the tickets, but I can’t solve a problem like this quickly. I wish I could, because then I would also catch up all of the requests for Verified Professional and the Community feature requests, and many other things that are so far behind that it seems impossible to catch up with.

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Well, there’s the problem. The flagged questions are probably accumulating faster than they are being addressed.

If you’re already understaffed and SWZD isn’t hiring people ( Job Listings - Spiceworks Ziff Davis ) …

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Well we all know that Spiceworks has evolved from the days the Daily Challenge was conceived and is now run by ZD and I have to admit that as a Brit I have no idea how ZD works as an organisation but I have a feeling if you push too hard for this to meet your expectations you are more likely to see it stopped altogether.

That is just my own $0.02

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Feel free to ask for a refund of your entry fee for the Daily Challenge.

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I understand what you’re saying - I simply disagree with it, not just because it’s a fatuous comment but also because it equates the expectation of quality to the price paid.

Let me try to explain it this way:

Your stats say 6,081 contributions, 134 Best Answers, 966 Helpful Votes.

Did you charge for any of those contributions? If there was no “fee” paid to you, did you just write any old nonsense or did you try to do your best? Did your sense of pride encourage you to provide a top-quality answer even though there was little in it for you other than the knowledge of having helped someone and, potentially, the respect of your peers?

BTW, if you still haven’t worked out that you are the product here, I’m not sure how else to explain it to you.

So, if you feel that SWZD’s contributions to “the community” can justifiably be of lower quality than the quality of your contributions, simply because the site is free, that is your absolute right. I happen to disagree.

I am sure that @suzanne-spiceworks ​ and the others working here are doing the best they can with limited resources, but SWZD isn’t valuing their work (or yours) despite whatever revenue it helps the site to generate. Perhaps the SWZD executives don’t understand the nature of the business they’re in or perhaps they are purely focused on increasing the profitability of the site at any cost (or more likely, by reducing every cost). Maybe they don’t like the idea of spending money to make money. Whatever the reason, the problem remains and if the contributors are happy to put up with it, I wouldn’t expect there to be any change in the near future.

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You’re perfectly entitled to disagree, and tbh I agree with some of what you said, I have noticed a change in SW since the ZD bit was brought in to the mix (and not for the better).

Yes to an extent we are all the product (I use an ad blocking browser though so don’t see that side of things). On the flip side though, I started with SW about 15 years ago when I downloaded and used their free helpdesk product, was I paying for that via adverts at the time, yes, sure I was (I was never going to get budget to pay for a system where I was then).

Indeed I have contributed lots to the community over the years and have helped other out. Was it from the goodness of my heart, yes to an extent. But I’ve also asked questions, and found answers via searches that have helped me, so it’s a bit quid-pro-quo as I see it. I give, but I take.

You’re right, SWZD take too, no doubt about it.

However, the questions you seem to upset about is from 4 years ago, pre ZD involvement. Somehow it slipped through the net. That’s bad, sure, but IMO not bad enough to get this upset over. Suzanne has given you an update on the current situation, and where they’re going from here, but it’s unfair to accuse Suzanne and her team of lowering the quality of SW because a question was missed, I believe before she even joined SW., certainly before she was responsible for the DC question queue.

As Briser says, if you want to push for the DC to be fully curated by SWZD with no errors, and anything flagged immediately dealt with, you’re on a hiding to nothing I fear, and would probably spell the end of the DC. Like every organization, SWZD have limited resources and need to deploy them against priorities. I can understand how a part of the community that is meant to be a fun, learning experience, is not as high on the priority list as others. It’s been stated elsewhere they know the issues with it, but in reality it needs a whole re-write. That’s not going to happen any time soon, so it’s live with it as is, or do without. Personally I enjoy the DC so will take it, warts and all, rather than decry the whole thing and the organization behind it because of my personal preferences or opinions.

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The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.

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And we all have a choice, we can do the daily challenge or we can stop doing it, oh there have been times, believe me :wink:.

You have that choice also.

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I think Z has addressed this very well with her response, but I just wanted to specifically address this bit here:

I can’t speak for anyone else on the team, I’m part time and on a different type of contract to most of the team, but the KPIs laid out in my contract are more abstract and don’t involve a particular product/feature. They’re related to the engagement of the community as a whole.

If there is sufficient evidence that the accuracy (and/or promptness of fixing inaccuracies and issues) in the Daily Challenge questions has a direct large impact on community engagement and retention, then it’s an obvious business move to put more resources into it. As of now, though, there are other (measurably important) factors at play, many of which aren’t publicly visible. Some of them may become visible in the future, many will not, though. :slightly_smiling_face:

I personally love the Daily Challenge, and it’s one of the things that kept me coming back to the community every morning (and still has me coming back daily on my civilian account at my other job) but part of the charm for me has always been that it’s community members’ submitted questions. To me, it’s always felt like another way we could share knowledge with each other, but due to the Dunning-Kruger confidence curve, one of the times you’re most willing to share knowledge with people is when you may not actually understand it yourself, so sometimes we get things wrong.

As for reviewing and fixing the questions, one of the things I’ve been trying to do is to keep newer questions under control, as we had a situation where we’d run out of new questions for certain (consistently active) community members to take, so I’ve been giving the newer questions a higher priority so our most active members can continue to enjoy the feature. I’ve also been trying to prioritize questions with the highest number of reports. Unfortunately for this one in particular, it doesn’t look like I can see the number of reports anymore, presumably because it’s been placed into moderation, but the more reports, the higher priority I give them. Unfortunately, there are quite a few folks who will voice their complaints in the comments of a question but not flag it for review, so I don’t always have accurate numbers to work on there.

I also wanted to address these (mostly because I myself also like seeing stats, and I hadn’t actually gathered them on the reports yet)

[ How many questions in the flagged queue? ] There are currently 484 questions with “unreviewed” flags on them, meaning no action has been taken yet. The mass majority of these only have a single flag (>200 of them) and are very low on my priority list at the moment. (don’t worry, I didn’t count them manually, I basically used a “find/replace” tool to count them for me😁)

[ How many people looking at them? ] I believe I’m the primary reviewer of these reports at the moment, I know I’ve seen @david-k-spiceworks ​ helping out with questions at least a few times (thanks David!)

[ How many can each person address per day? ] As Z mentioned, this isn’t currently a constant. My contract states a maximum number of hours I can work per week, but my time is primarily limited by factors outside of SWZD’s control, and I don’t think I’ve ever been able to dedicate even close to that maximum. Feel free to blame me for that if it makes you feel better :wink:

Even if I did have dedicated time, though, the amount of time each takes greatly varies depending on the quality of the original question, the source provided (if one was provided), my existing knowledge on the subject, the quality of the information in the reports themselves (some just say “this is wrong” with no context as to why, for example), and the community’s response to my suggested edits, as I’ll often ask the community (or at least authors) their thoughts if I’m not particularly confident in my knowledge of the subject, or if it changes the question significantly from the original.

I hope this helps!

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As has been mentioned in the discussion, the questions are submitted by Community members. So what is the absolute, 100%, best thing YOU can do to improve the quality of the questions in the Daily Challenge? You can submit high quality questions!

Submitting QUALITY questions comes with these perks:

  • It will consume a good amount of your time to research your topic for accuracy, and to come up with three PLAUSIBLE but WRONG answers in addition to your RIGHT answer.
  • Once it becomes active, you then get to read comments from people who don’t like your question, some of which insult your intelligence for writing it. This particular comment was left for one of my questions that I spent 3-4 HOURS crafting to ensue it was high quality: “This is a very, very, very poor question. Even for a ‘question of the day’ from here.”
  • You then get the pleasure of responding to comments to defend your question.

As you can see, it’s REALLY FUN! So please, submit some questions.

But seriously, here are some other comments from that same question, and these make it worth it to me:

  • Good question and a great explanation! I applaud @CharlesHTN for the question and detailed explanation.
  • Good question and an even better explanation.
  • This is a very good question. All the naysayers obviously either didn’t pay close enough attention to the wording of the question and/or didn’t read though the thorough explanation to understand why the incorrect answers were, in fact, incorrect.
  • Excellent question. I am happy to see questions of this nature here.
  • Finally a trivia question with real world application.
  • A great question, with a great explanation. It was a pleasure to answer this one.

Please remember that the authors of questions are just fellow community members. Some submit great questions, some, not so much. For whatever reason, the theme song to “The Facts of Life” is now stuck in my head. “You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have the Spiceworks Daily Challenge.” LOL

2 Spice ups