by Lawrence Krubner on Sep 03, 2010
PlanetOzh gives a positive review of WP Questions:
Over the recent months, a site that can make you big money has really found its audience, from a clever promising idea to an active community of users. I’ve already mentioned it when it started, and I mentioning it again now because it is getting big: WP Questions.
If you don’t know this site, the theory is dead simple: people ask questions and disclose the little amount of money they’re willing to offer, experts answer and hopefully win the cash if their answer gets selected.
Since its debuts, the site has gained real traction and what used to be cheap ass $3 questions are now much more interesting little gigs. Interestingly too, there are now coders who completely offloaded their support to WP Questions, such as Ronalfy with his WordPress and Ajax ebook.
by Lawrence Krubner on Aug 18, 2010
It took 7 months for WP Questions to see $5,000. From there it took 22 days for it to reach the $6,000 mark. From there it took 20 days to reach the next milepost. I am pleased to see WP Questions cross the $7,000 threshold.
by Lawrence Krubner on Aug 05, 2010
A few more charts are now available, regarding WP Questions. Of these, the most interesting is probably the one shows how much money is given out as prize money each week.
I didn't have time to write the code for the charts so I hired Lark Davis to build out the remaining charts that I wanted. Many thanks to her.
by Lawrence Krubner on Aug 02, 2010
With the permission of Allan Cole, I'm going to use his themes as an example to talk about our donation program.
Some background info:
We have software that runs on the 1st of each month and sends out the money, 3% of any question. Today was the first of the month, and our software sent the following email to Allan Cole.
One of our goals is to be good citizens of the open source communities we belong to, and for us, good citizenship entails sharing some of our revenue with the developers, so we offer to donate 25% of our profits whenever we get questions marked with the custom tags related to their projects (plugins, themes, software).
Your project is named: Allan Cole Themes
Custom tags associated with your software: Boumatic, Mixtape, allan cole, autofocus, fthrwght, neutica
Number of questions with these keywords: 7
http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/689
http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/686
http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/666
http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/629
http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/610
http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/593
http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/555
Total to be donated: 4.29
take care,
the team at WP Questions
http://www.wpquestions.com/
These are pure donations on our part, an attempt to help support open source development. Allan Cole doesn't need to do anything to get this money, but every month we will send him money when we get questions that touch upon his themes.
If you are a developer of open source WordPress themes are plugins, you should register too.
by Lawrence Krubner on Jul 31, 2010
Some interesting stats about WP Questions:
168 people have asked a question.
196 people have posted an attempt at an answer.
84 people have received money for their answers.
1,351 people have joined the site.
So, about 1 in 8 (12.4%) of the members ask questions, and about 1 in 7 (14.5%) post answers (there is some overlap, as some members both ask questions and answer questions).
Of those who have posted an attempt at an answer, 42.9% have received money for their answers.
For me, the big surprise is that there are more people asking questions than there are people getting paid for answers. On a site where prize money can be split among multiple experts, and on average 1.2 people receive money for every question, I would expect the number of experts receiving money to be greater than the number of people asking questions. But apparently that is not the way it works. Clay Shirky long ago noted that freedom of choice will lead to an inequality of results as people's previous choices effect other people's future choices, but I assume that is not what is happening here. I'm guessing there is a small core of advanced experts who just happen to have the best answers to most people's questions, most of the time. Though I am keeping an open mind about this.
I'm also very curious about the 73% of the membership that has neither asked a question nor attempted an answer. Perhaps they are simply fascinated with the posts, and so they've signed up so they can read along. That would make sense to me, since one can learn a lot about WordPress, simply by reading the questions and answers on WP Questions. I know that I, personally, have learned a lot.
by Lawrence Krubner on Jul 29, 2010
We just got this suggestion via email:
I have a suggestion to make on the usability front. Right now, the < code > tag contents comes with a horizontal scrollbar. It's pretty annoying to view the code that way.
How about changing it, to like the ones on wordpress blogs. By default, the overflow would be hidden and on mouseover, the code box expands to show the whole code. It'd also have options for "Quick copy" and "print"
I am curious how other people feel about how we format code?
