Tour to Improve the Discoverability of Old Challenges

Question

We've got some pretty great challenges here. However, after a month or so, challenges get little to no activity. Since we aren't a Q&A site, we rarely get traffic via searches. I would love it if we could introduce users to high quality questions that they may not have found on their own.

I believe that some sort of Tour of PPCG would help the discoverability of our older questions (name not set in stone). This tour would consist of an ordered list of challenges, where users would aim to complete all of them

There are a couple of details that need ironing out:

1. How we pick the questions that appear on the tour
2. How many questions are on the tour
3. How we present the tour (and make it visible)
4. How/If we reward users that complete the tour

Does this sound like a good idea? If so, how should address the above details?

Answer 1

Yes, let's do this

The implementation should be:

1. Make a meta post where people can nominate the any challenge. People vote on challenges based on:
   1. The quality of the challenge
   2. If there is sufficient room for many distinct answers (in the same language). We want to avoid situations where identical answers are independently developed
   3. Difficulty of the challenge. The tour shouldn't be infeasibly difficult, nor trivially easy. Ideally, we'd have challenges across the entire range of difficulty.
2. I think that 25 questions is a good amount
3. After voting is finished, a meta post is created that links to all 25 challenges. Each of the challenges gets and edit with a link of Tour Challenge # of 25 that links back to the meta post. I believe that adding a link on the challenge is necessary because:
   1. It helps people discover the tour itself. There are people that never visit our meta, and the tour page may rarely get edited.
   2. It makes for easy navigation
4. Finishers are added to the Tour meta post. Optionally, an answer can be put on the Tour post that highlights awesome answers from a particular finisher. It would also be awesome if there was a custom badge we could give out.

What if we do multiple tours?

Completing a tour is supposed to be a big deal. If there are a bunch of tours, then completing one of them matters less.

That said, I'm not entirely against multiple tours, but they would need to be a rare event (like once a year). Ideally, future tours would also be themed, so that each tour is standalone, ensuring that completing a tour is a big deal.

Answer 2

Yes, that would be awesome!

I love the idea presented by @NathanMerrill, and his approache overall. But I think an other point of view would not harm.

I think we should focus on re-discovering old-challenges, going with the principle that we have done some great work untill now, and most of our challenge are of great quality.

I see this challenge tour as something that will change with time, proposing new challenge on a monthly/bimonthly basis.

The implementation of such a tour would be

1. Pick 10-15 challenges

   1. pick challenges from a lot of different tags (to provide content for every needs)

   2. This part could be done with a script, the returned question could then be reviewed to see if they are good enough

   3. It could also be handpicked, but would then require a vote for each rotation, making it happens on a quaterly basis would then be better

2. Create a meta post containing this 10-15 challenges

   1. name this post Challenge Tour n°#

   2. pin it so it can be seen on the main site

I don't think we need any kind of reward for the people answering these challenge, having the opportunity to discover some new challenges is rewarding in itself.