Q: Want to help the new CiviCRM StackExchange site succeed, but don't have spare time/brainpower for answering difficult questions?
A: That's okay! It turns out that the one thing this fledgling site needs the most is also the easiest thing you can do. Voting!
Why Voting Helps our Site
If you visit our beta health stats you'll see that our site has an excellent number of daily questions and a pretty good number of answers. But we're falling short on:
> Number of users with 200+ rep
> Number of users with 2000+ rep
> Daily visits
The solution? Visit the site each day and up-vote good questions and answers! When you vote for good content on our StackExchange site, you're really voting for CiviCRM.
Why Voting Helps Everyone
- The best answers to each question rise to the top, but only if people vote for them!
- New users get encouragement (and important privileges like commenting) when you upvote their questions.
- Helpful people get recognition and responsibilities to help moderate the site.
- It sets an example, which encourages others to vote as well.
How to Vote
-
Vote Today: You get 40 votes per day. If you use them all you get this nifty badge:
- Vote Tomorrow: With over 10 new questions daily, there's always something new to vote for.
- Vote for Quality: It doesn't have to be a question that's pertinant to you, or an answer you needed to know. But if a post is well written and helpful, show your support with an up-vote.
- Make it Habit: Once you get into the habit of voting, up-voting a post just becomes part of reading it.
- Use down-votes sparingly: If a question or answer is not helpful, consider leaving a comment with constructive criticism or making an edit to improve readability.
Why Not Vote?
- No one else seems to be doing it. You're right, a lot of excellent posts have only 1, or zero up-votes. Let's change that!
- Someone else already up-voted it. There's no limit to the number of up-votes a post can receive. Just because it has one vote doesn't mean you shouldn't make it 2. Ten or more votes for a nice question or answer would be great!
- It was "good" but not "amazing". There's no rule that says a post has to be the best you've ever seen before you can up-vote it. You get 40 votes per day, and if the author clearly put some effort into what they wrote, they deserve one of them!
- I just forgot. Yea that happens, but if you get into a habit it will become easier to remember. What I do is hover my mouse over the up-vote button while I'm reading. That reminds me to click when I'm done reading if the post seemed useful.
But you don't have to take my word for it, here's what the StackExchange staff have to say about it:
The best way to encourage wide-spread voting on a site is to vote yourself! If you haven't run out of votes yet today, don't think in terms of how to get other people to vote; go do it yourself. Before you know it, it will simply become a part of the fabric of the site.
Comments
As well as voting, if you're the one asking the question, you can pick an answer to accept as the best and give it a green tick. Please do this if someone solves your problem / gives a good explanation!