First I want to thank all of our awesome users who stepped up to the plate and helped out on a day that will live on in infamy, Answerama Day. The Facebook post got us a lot more eyes on the site, and it did result in a lot of interesting questions, but it also resulted in some solid stuff that is now beneficial to our community.
Now I write this Meta post warning you that it is entirely possible it will happen again on Monday, July 2nd.
Comedy Central will be issuing a press release detailing the events of the second half of our Futurama partnership (indeed, the very event that was the impetus for the team-up). We will be one of a few sites listed in this partnership, so perhaps that will splinter a possible flood. I have also requested that said press release not mention prizes, as I believe the FB post mentioning prizes led to a lot of people posting without regard to quality. Trust me, everyone on Stack's end agrees that incentivizing people to ask just any old question for a prize is bad mojo. It states in Answerama's rules that score and being open are two necessities for a question to be considered for a prize, but those quality-enforcing metrics were left out of the FB post (understandably so, as there's only so much info you can write in a FB post).
However, if the press release does result in another Answerama Day style flood, here are some tips to help out and survive!
- If you are a Futurama fan have fun checking out the new content and determining whether or not it is upvotable or closable.
- If you are not a Futurama fan, be on the lookout for trivia, general reference or joke questions to flag and close.
- Everyone be on the lookout for questions that need editing, specifically the titles of questions. Remember, question titles need to actually convey what the question is asking.
- Be nice! This is probably this person's first time on a Stack Exchange site and we have quality standards and rules that don't exist anywhere else on the wild west that is the internet. That's what makes us great! Politely explain to them how they can improve and point out the things they are doing right. Be nice!
- Be merciless! If a question can't be on our site, do what you can to get it off the site. If it needs drastic edits, make them. Remember that Comedy Central wants us to be involved because of our high standards. Let's do what they expect us to do (and be nice while doing it)!
- If you hate all of this nonsense and just want to wait until the storm passes, Anna Lear posted a handy guide about ignoring tags.
Thanks for all your help yesterday and hopefully things will go much more smoothly on Monday (if anything happens at all). We are learning a lot about these types of events on our end. This is getting us a lot of outward facing exposure and building a relationship with a big media company, and hopefully getting us new users who will prove to be valuable in our site's growth.
