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2013 was a great year for workplace.se:

  1. We helped several users improve their real-life situation
  2. We were featured on the SE podcast
  3. We have seen a huge increase in visits and active users getting us closer to graduation
  4. We have worked hard on defining the scope of the site and maintaining question quality
  5. We RhysW cleaned up a lot of our tags

There are lots of things that we have accomplished as a community, and I look forward to working with all of you in 2014 to continue making The Workplace a better resource to help real people improve their professional lives.

A New Year brings new opportunities and a fresh start. What do you think our focuses in 2014 should be on? These can be big or small, but let's get the community thinking about what we can all do to improve this site and contribute positively to The Workplace.

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Vote Early, Vote Often

Despite having a lot of users, we have a lot of questions with few votes. From 2013 alone, there were 120 questions with 0 score, and 666 answers with 0 score. We need to Vote Early, and Vote Often in 2014 to give better signals to our users about the quality of our contents. We only have 9 people with the electorate badge, and 62 with civic duty. Let's all work harder on voting on our questions to make sure that the good content rises above the mediocre and bad.

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    I completely agree, and voting on questions (I typically vote more on answers) is something I started making a concerted effort to do a few months ago. However, I will nitpick a bit and note that more than a few of those 0 score Qs & As actually DO have votes, but the upvotes and downvotes cancel each other out to thus appear as 0. :)
    – jcmeloni
    Jan 7, 2014 at 0:16
  • @jcmeloni, details details (I knew this, I just didn't want to do an API query to try to figure out which ones actually have zero votes, and which just have zero score). I am personally horrible at voting, so this is something I really need to get a move on. I'm considering starting a meta thread and posting 10 old questions for people to vote on each week based on highest views per month or somesuch. We have 21 months of questions now, so posting 10 questions from each month with the highest views each week would take about half a year, and garner us all about 300 question votes by the end.
    – jmac
    Jan 7, 2014 at 0:30
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What do you think our focuses in 2014 should be on?

Clearer, easier to understand rules.

In my opinion, far too many people visit Workplace, post a question, and have it immediately put On Hold for a variety of reasons.

The reasons don't seem very consistent. They are frustrating for me - I have to believe they are frustrating for new visitors as well. And I wonder if we lose valuable contributors and traffic due to this lack of consistency as well.

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    +100: These reasons don't seem very consistent. They've never been consistent. And I made a big stink about this at the very beginning. meta.workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/2038/…
    – Jim G.
    Jan 6, 2014 at 19:15
  • Hey Joe, I don't know if you saw it, but I tried to refine the on-topic and off-topic portions of the help center to more directly reflect how we actually seem to act on things here if you want to add your two cents.
    – jmac
    Jan 6, 2014 at 23:32
  • @jmac: Thank you for that. I think we're doing a lot better these days. I just wish that we could encourage the hundreds of users who we've lost to give us another chance.
    – Jim G.
    Jan 6, 2014 at 23:53
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    @Jim, I don't think it's a big issue. Our traffic is growing incredibly well (source) and new users are pouring in through search engines because we have quality content. Many may not participate, but providing a better environment going forward will certainly get more to stick around. That's how I found SE in the first place after all...
    – jmac
    Jan 6, 2014 at 23:55
  • @jmac - I'll look at the help center revisions as soon as I have a chance. Thanks!
    – Joe Strazzere
    Jan 8, 2014 at 20:12
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Get the Blog Started

We've been discussing a Workplace.se blog since 2012 but haven't actually gotten one going. A new year means we can take a new shot at getting some of our regular users to contribute to a blog and create a different type of resource for our users.

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