pluggyboy: guys, not sure whether this will help anyone as my configuration was slightly different to that described above (using weight rate with no downloadable products) but I began getting the same error message at checkout.

With no answers here, I headed over to http://www.wpquestions.com and asked the question there, and for $35 got the answer within a few hours, which is available here: http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/144

hope this helps someone, thoroughly recommend the site if you've a plugin / theme issue you cant get resolved by the owner, there's a great community of very skilled people over there who are willing to help for relatively small micro payments.

If you have had a good experience on WP Questions, please contact us and let us know.

Right now what we're considering is a hosted solution, a little bit like Basecamp or WordPress.com, but living at your own domain name.

Some features we could offer:

1. The site could exist at your own domain. It would live on our server, but to the outside world, it would appear to be your site.
2. You would use your own PayPal account (in the future perhaps we'd enable other payment methods)
3. Your site's questions could be sync'd with a Twitter account you set up.
4. Customization would be limited to changing the header, footer and some images. You wouldn't be able to change any of the forms, since that would entail supporting multiple versions of the code.
5. There would be a monthly subscription fee, plus a percentage of whatever you take in. You could set your own fees, on top of the question amounts.
6. You could set your own minimum fee for posting new questions.
7. Easy advertising implementation in the sidebar.

We'd like to open the discussion to existing users of WPQ and see if it sparks and ideas and interest. Let us know what you think!

It all began with Darren Hoyt’s tweet:

interesting new question over at WPQ courtesy of @jophillips, any ideas? – http://bit.ly/7NOEl3

The particular question was about adding an “old” or “new” class for a listed Links based on whether the Link is inserted less/more than 31 days from now.

Curious, I dug around the Codex and into the core files. I began to think about filtering wp_list_bookmarks. Tabs upon tabs were opened, lines of code tested. Finished, I logged in into my WPQuestions account and opened the page again.

Amazingly, the question was already solved (this is only a couple hours after Darren linked to it), and there I saw two different solutions, both solved the problem with a short and easy to understand piece of code. One of it involved editing core file, which generally is undesirable, but both codes were undeniably elegant and to-the-point.
Lesson Learned

Compared to those two codes, mine was much longer: it involves regular expressions, string replacement, and so on. While it did work, I concluded that I was just thinking too far. The first solution didn’t worry about editing core files, while it’s something completely out-of-question for me. The second solution simply do away with creating its own list, while I insisted on making use of wp_list_bookmarks‘ output, forcing me to go the regex route.

...To put it short: I had too many rules in mind while looking for a solution.

The question was "Change the class of a blogroll link if older than 30 days".

As I said, I can relate to what Rahman is saying. I certainly know what it is like to spend hours thinking about a very complex solution to a problem, and then later realize (or have someone show me) that there was a more elegant solution. I hope WP Questions continues to attract such quick, elegant solutions as those offered for this question.

Thomas Maier writes::

WP support. Basically what you expected, right? Yes, from an superficial perspective. WP Questions introduced a whole new idea to a world which was totally uncommerical: Payment. And what it makes so cool is that these fucking five bucks or what you spend for a emergency question make it incredibly efficient and really fast. You’ll get quick and professional answers. And ideally by answering questions of others you “win” your money back. And above all it has a great and simple design which impressed me quite a bit.

That sums it up well: introducing a commercial element is the aim. I think the free forums are somewhat unfair to the experts who volunteer their time there. Ultimately, the success of WP Questions should be judged by whether or not we make it easier for experts to earn money off of their knowledge. In response to the launch of WageMachine, I said:

I’ve had stretches of $100 an hour work followed by stretches of almost no work coming in, and I’ve been left wondering, why isn’t there more in the middle? And why can’t my own wage vary up and down casually, depending on circumstances, including such trivial circumstances as:

Am I at a friends house, waiting on a friend?

Am I bored and trying to kill time?

At such times I often go on to forums and answer people’s questions. Such work isn’t worth $100 an hour but it is worth something. So why aren’t there more places where I could pick up some money for answering such questions?

Implicit in the idea of "make it easier for experts to earn money off of their knowledge" is "give askers faster and better quality answers". I believe these 2 aims fit together naturally.

Scribu offers this review of our site:

What you’re paying for is not the knowledge itself – you could get that free of charge, by asking in the WordPress.org support forums. But by asking on WP Questions, you have a higher chance of getting a timely answer from one or more knowledgeable people, whereas in the WP.org forums your question could simply be overlooked or be given a half-baked answer.

I really think this could work. With the ever-growing user base of WordPress, a need for reliable, high-quality support is starting to appear. See WP Help Center for instance.

It was my frustration with "half-baked answers" that lead me to start thinking about a site like this. As I wrote in the very first post:

And yet, over the years, I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with free forums. I find it frustrating when I post a question that is altogether unique, but someone mistakes it for a common question, and so the only reply I get is “RTFM!!!!!” When people offer you free help, sometimes they are wonderful, but sometimes they attack you for aspects of your project that are beyond your control. For instance, I was once asked to fix a Javascript slideshow that depended on jQuery for functionality, and when I posted some of the code to a forum, the only response I got was “Do not use jQuery!” But it was the lead programmer on that project who had decided to use jQuery, and I didn’t have the power to change that. I only had the power to fix the problem that I had been assigned.

In the comments, I was confused by this:

I covered the site in July of 2008

We launched just 4 weeks ago, on December 8th of 2009. The domain name was previously owned by Leland of themelab.com. I was under the impression that he had never used the domain name for anything, but I could be wrong about that.

There’s a search field, but it would be nice if the site had a public archive of questions answered in the past.

This is good advice, and we've adopted the suggestion. The archives are now public. We may in the future adopt a mixed model.

Will WP Questions still be here next year?

I hope so! And I hope by then we've been able to roll out similar sites for MySql, PHP, Ruby, Groovy, Grails, etc.

Oliver Schlöbe writes up a plugin from code that he posted on WP Questions. In the spirit of our fundraiser, we expect to eventually have partially hidden archives, paid access, and we hope to pay royalty payments to peple who have offered answers like Oliver.

In Step 1, you are prompted for a Question Title (65 characters or less) and Extended Explanation:

Our aim is to create a market for WordPress help, so that you can ask your WordPress questions and get fast, expert information. Please explain your problem with enough detail that the Experts can answer accurately. If you've forgotten a crucial detail, you can always edit your question later.

In Step 2, you can add optional tags or upload a screenshot:

The tags help our Experts determine if your question is in their area of expertise. The image-upload is useful to show Experts, visually, what kind of problem you're having.

In Step 3, you can set the dollar amount for your question.

As a ballpark estimate, many Experts will want at least $1 for each minute they work. For the example question above, I think my problem might take 30 minutes for someone to figure out, so I offer $30 as a prize. (I'm actually re-posting an old question that Darren has already asked.)

In Step 4, you'll see a summary of your question and the overall charges. Our fees are 9% of the prize that you've offered, plus 50 cents. This on top of the prize you are offering, so a prize of $30 leads to a total cost of $33.20.

Click the "Pay" button and you'll be taken to PayPal to pay:

Once you've paid on PayPal, you are redirected back to our site.

But wait, is the question showing up? We rely on PayPal to ping our servers and say "This transaction was good". This takes several seconds, and sometimes you will return to our site before PayPal has pinged our servers. Just wait a few seconds, and then hit refresh. Now you will see that your question is active:

As soon as your question goes live, we update our RSS feeds and we also post a link on Twitter, instantly notifying the many people who might be able to help you.

Once you've gotten some good answers, you will want to choose a winner. See the previous tutorial to understand how to assign the prize money to the experts who've answered your question.

Get started and ask your WordPress question now!

To address some recent questions about how WPQuestions works, we've written the first of a few tutorials. Below, we demonstrate what happens after you, the Asker, has logged in and asked a question.

Here is your sample question:

As the Asker, you will see this button next to each answer (login required):

It doesn't matter who you chose as the winner, since you get to change your mind on the next screen. You'll get the option of giving all the money to one Expert, or you can divide the money among multiple Experts:

If you click the option to "Divide the prize money amongst multiple Experts", the form will expand to reveal every answer that has been posted. Use the dropdown boxes to divide the prize money accordingly:

The money you award to the Experts needs to equal the prize money you've paid for this question. Otherwise you get an error message like this:

When the money has been portioned out accurately, the money will be sent and you'll see this message:

This post by Jeff Atwood ("Version 1 Sucks, But Ship It Anyway") affirms why letting go of perfectionism is a must if you're ever going to launch the site, get your feet wet, swallow your pride and start learning from your users:

The velocity and responsiveness of your team to user feedback will set the tone for your software, far more than any single release ever could. That's what you need to get good at. Not the platonic ideal of shipping mythical, perfect software, but being responsive to your users, to your customers, and demonstrating that through the act of continually improving and refining your software based on their feedback. So to the extent that you're optimizing for near-perfect software releases, you're optimizing for the wrong thing.

There's no question that, for whatever time budget you have, you will end up with better software by releasing as early as practically possible, and then spending the rest of your time iterating rapidly based on real world feedback.

Some people thought that if they wanted to ask a question, they needed to use the same email address on WP Questions as they use with PayPal. The answer is no, not at all.

Your PayPal account is separate from your WP Questions account. Once you ask a question, you will be taken to PayPal. At that point, you can type in any account info that you choose. We do not store your PayPal info. If you used one PayPal account one day (to pay for a question), but then a different account a different day (to pay for a different question), we would not automatically know. We could piece it together if we wanted to, by looking to see what user id is associated with the question being paid for, but my point is we do not explicitly tie your questions to any particular PayPal account.

There is one situation where you will need to have your WP Questions email address associated with a PayPal account: if you are an expert and you have won money by answering questions. When you make a withdrawal from WP Questions we send the money, via PayPal, to whatever email address you are using for your WP Questions account. So, at some point, you'll want that email address to be attached to a PayPal account.

How do you get your money? If you are an expert and you've won some money by answering questions, go to your user dashboard and withdraw the money. Look for the words "Withdraw cash to PayPal?". If you have a balance of $100 in your WP Questions account, you could type 100 into that form, then hit the "Withdraw Cash" button, and the money will be sent via PayPal to whatever email address is associated with your WP Questions account.

Those of you who are simply asking questions are free to use one email address on this site, and an entirely different email address on PayPal.

If anyone ever needs to change the email address they are using for their WP Questions account, they can do so on their user dashboard.

By the way, you can also upload an avatar for your user account on that page. We encourage people to do so.

Finally, please note, our fees are in addition to the prize money. So if you are asking a question and you are putting up $20 as a prize, we will charge you $2.30 in addition (that is 9% plus 50 cents). So when our software redirects you to PayPal, you will be asked to pay $22.30.

Hafiz Rahman wrote:

I like the well-defined rules on WPQuestions and how simple it is to ask and answer there.

Ian Steward had kind words:

Brilliant idea and brilliant execution.

Andrew Rickmann had kind words:

WP Questions is a great idea. I wasn't sure at first but seeing a few questions has converted me.

Kulpreet Singh called us inevitable:

#WordPress paid question-answer. Inevitable: http://www.wpquestions.com

Aviva Johnson struck a non-committed note that really made me chuckle:

Curious to see if this takes off: WP Questions http://www.wpquestions.com

Hey, me too, Aviva! I'm really curious to see if this takes off!

Many people tried the site and sent us great feedback. Utkarsh posted an answer and notified us of a problem with the formatting of the HTML in the answers, which we fixed immediately.

Tom de Bruin sent us a detailed bug report, alerting us to the fact that sometimes HTML was visible on screen:

I noticed it happening a few times in various locations, on the top experts "+" bit and under the sponsor . When I've just looked the following has appeared on the front page:

?ui=2&view=att&th=1257035cb4bc9c21&attid=0.1&disp=attd&realattid=ii_1257035cb4bc9c21&zw

I've attached the 'view source' of that page. I haven't been through it but thought it may help you track the error down.

I've seen this myself but I can not figure out the problem. It is fleeting, if you hit refresh it goes away - which makes it difficult to figure out what is going on. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks again, Tom. We are grateful to get such a detailed bug report.

There were certain questions that came up repeatedly. We've covered most of them on our About page, but I'll offer a few quick responses here (these specific questions are from qwik3r, they are representative of other questions that we received):

1.) Do you make it mandatory for askers to put money in escrow? Otherwise they can just get the free answer and not pick anyone.

Yes, the askers pay first. The money is is there for the answerers. We worry about people possibly gaming the system, and we've taken measures to make that less likely.

2.) Do you have a feed for all questions so we can stay up to date quickly?

Yes, there is an RSS feed that shows all new questions.

3.) Are askers allowed to respond or post follow up questions after an expert has had the chance to possibly clarify their question?

The asker can edit their post to further clarify it, in response to clarifying questions they might get from potential answerers.

4.) Does pointing someone to a plugin count as answering a question?

Pointing to a plugin could be a good answer, if the plugin does everything the asker is looking for. The decision is usually up to the asker to decide.

Justin Tadlock posted an answer, first with a small error, and then again in corrected form. He pointed out the need for some way to edit the answers:

Ahh! Where's the edit button? I posted the incorrect version. Please use this version instead

Others (Japh, Ron R, etc) made the same point to us. In fact, having some way to edit the answers was probably the single most requested feature that we heard about yesterday. This raises some issues of integrity and fairness, as someone might post a bad answer, and then later someone else posts a good answer, and the first answerer might edit their answer, based on the information offered in the later answer. Rzen was quick to point out the problem:

@justintadlock @darrenhoyt if you allow experts to edit make sure there is some way to display the revisons to prevent cheatery

We rely on the askers to be fair when they hand out the awards, and we have to have some faith that they will use good judgment. From a programming stand point, we can offer askers more information about who offered what information, and when. After some discussion, we decided that when someone posts an answer, the whole answer should be emailed to the asker (since this is not an advertising supported site, we do not face the typical pressure of trying to maximize the number of people going to the site). The emails will give the asker the full history of the answers they receive. We should have this implemented by Friday.

Stuart Duff wrote a thoughtful post about what we are trying to do. He made this interesting point about the pricing:

One of the things I noticed is currently the minimum price you need to set when asking for help is $20 (£12 UK) which seems a little on the high side to me. I know $20 isn’t necessarily a huge sum of money but it may be high enough to deter many from using this service, after all your only asking a question which could be available with a search on Google for free, right?. Alternatively you could ask for free help on any wordpress related support forum and probably receive the correct answer or be pointed in the right direction if you don’t mind waiting a few hours. On the flip side of this you do need to make the service worthwhile for people to participate and answer the questions in the first instance, a kind of catch 22 balancing act I suppose.

LiliekS also raised the issue of price:

20$ for a question and answer. Is it worth it?

We appreciate your feedback. I am sure in the months to come we will spend a lot of time thinking about the price issue.

I've been working on websites for 10 years, and I'm very pleased with how our first day went - much better than average. We received a lot of valuable bug reports and thoughtful feedback. I was pleased to see some questions posted. Our fees are 9% plus 50 cents. PayPal takes about 3% and 30 cents, so our net profit from yesterday was less than $10 dollars, but, hey, that means we made more on our first day than Twitter made during its first 2 years. Which leaves me hopeful that we are, in fact, offering a service that provides real utility to people. And as we listen to your feedback and implement the better ideas, we hope to be able to offer an even greater service in the future.