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Hi,

The system is probably working, as posted questions find answers very often. I was thinking how the people willing to provide answers could be supported better. What about some notification area in the profile that hints the user towards new/unanswered/hot questions on his field of expertise? Would this make it easier for people to find the right questions that they are able to answer quickly?

As always there are two approaches to do so, the simple, easy one: let the user decide on which tags he wants to be triggered, maybe allow for a simple boolean expression for tag combinations and serve him some hints towards unresolved questions.

Or second, derive the expertise of the user by evaluating the tags of his answers, weighted by upvotes, and simply allow the user to choose whether to use or not use these notifications. It might be sufficient to simply count the upvotes on tags and derive some threshold for the tags which define the users expertise set. Then the user is diplayed some of the current questions that match this expertise set best.

Obviously the latter method has a little problem with getting into gear as the user has to show some expertise before being enrolled in the program. But also obviously not everybody is entitled to be invited to answers, thus he has to earn some reputation/badges/upvotes before he can be enrolled nonetheless. As an incentive the user could be awarded extra reputation for answering (correctly) such an invited answer (very similar to invited talks on conferences).

The ob-question: Does this seem like a good idea?

2 Answers 2

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You would certainly want a time-delay before notification kicks in. And a opt-out if you go with the automatic version.

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Actually the first (the static) notification type is not too badly implemented by going to "Unanswered Questions" and choosing "My Tags".

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