A significant amount of my life has been centered around playing and making music along with the joy of owning my own recording studio. It’s amazing how many options there are available to the recording enthusiast these days, unfortunately the side effect of having so many options is of course finding help or suggestions when you hit a road block — so away to the Internet we go…
…first stop, message boards and forums. If you are like me and have regularly turned to message boards for answers to questions you have, maybe you would agree with something I realized some time back that
searching through message boards and forums is not very enjoyable!
All too many times my searches would end in frustration as I’ve often found it extremely difficult and clunky to navigate these sites. The search functionality is usually rudimentary, the layout almost always cramped and over-loaded with information, and there no good way to decipher the good authors from the bad. Let’s face it, most of this underlying software was great when it was first developed well over a decade ago, but I think we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard today.
So, I’ve decided to do something about out it…and I have. I’ve launched a new recording community powered by software that I’ve developed from scratch that I hope will address many of the issues I described above.
How to separate the good from the bad.
Why should you trust some random post by someone you don’t know that may or may-not have any clue about what they are talking about? On recording Questions, users gain experience points whenever they contribute to the site in a positive fashion, and therefore over time earn trust within the community. Best of all this trust comes from other community members — we let your peers judge you on the quality of your content. As members gain experience, they are afforded greater freedom and abilities throughout the site — a reward for being an active and engaged member.
Determining quality -
The simple voting system on RecordingQuestions.com determines how information is organized and ranked. The more votes an answer has, the closer it appears to the top of the page. The best answers (as voted on by you, the community) always appear at the top of the page where they may be easily found.
Keeping people engaged in the site over time
It’s fun to get stuff, and what better way to keep members involved than to provide some type of incentive system. Members will collect different awards based on achievements they accomplish throughout the site. This can be as simple as casting your first vote or as rare as posting something marked as a favorite by 100 other people. It’s surprisingly addicting to look forward to that next award while you contribute to the community.
For those of you interested in learning a bit more about the site, please feel free to stop by the frequently asked questions page where we go into much more detail about how many of these systems work.
Be sure to follow the evolution of the new system on the Official Recording Questions Blog where I plan to post updates from time to time.
