Friday, November 01, 2013

Unanswered Shakespeare Questions

About two and a half years ago I launched a companion site to Shakespeare Geek called ShakespeareAnswers.com.  This site was intended to be a Q&A site in the flavor of Yahoo Answers or Quora, where all the content was strictly in an Ask a Question, Get Some Answers, Pick Your Favorite Answer format.

Quite honestly I stopped paying attention to it after that, until recently.

Turns out that it pulls in about as much traffic as this site does!  So I'm dusting it off and poking around a bit, seeing how I can improve the user experience now that I know there's thousands of people pouring through the site.

I've pulled out the list of most popular questions that have no answers. These are the questions that people are typing into a search engine, and then coming to Shakespeare Answers in the hope of finding an answer, only to find ... nothing.  I'll bet that there's nothing in the database that my loyal readers can't handle.

THIS IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A HOMEWORK CHEATING SITE.  You are welcome and encouraged to "preach" Shakespeare as much as you feel is necessary to explain your answer.  If somebody came looking only for a quick yes no answer and an answer/scene citation, and they don't want to actually learn anything? Well, that's their problem.  It's my vision to have *good* answers to these questions, not just answers that will get a passing grade on the homework.

With that in mind, let's get to the questions!


4 comments:

JM said...

Hey Duane,

Noticed that you changed the login page at Shakespeare Answers. I used to log in with my Google account and pw. Can no longer do so. The only other option seems to be a *temporary* fix. Although I had a user name for the site, I never had a dedicated password other than the same one for google. It worked yesterday but not today-- What to do?
Thanks, JM

Duane Morin said...

Hi J! Sorry for the trouble. Other users reported that social login (Twitter specifically) wasn't working for them, and I leapt to the conclusion that it wouldn't be working for anybody so I disabled it. I'll see if I can't bring it back up over the weekend.

JM said...

Duane,
Thanks.
Seems to be working now. In fact, although it eventually worked fine before, Google sign in used to hang for a while, as though it wasn't going to work at all, when first clicked on the old page. Not anymore.
If there's another way that works for *everyone* I'd be happy to do it. But as I said, as of now I only have the one pw. Let me know.
J

JM said...

Spoke too soon. It does hang an inordinate amount of time when clicked on but eventually becomes active upon waiting for it. My cursor changes when it becomes active. Maybe that's what was happening with the Twitter one and they just didn't wait long enough, thinking it wasn't working at all?