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What is a Question Pool? |
A question pool is a list of questions that all experts in a particular category can answer.
You will find the links to these lists in the Categories section of your Expert Home Page.
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Where do the questions in the pool come from? |
Questions join the pool in 2 ways. Volunteers can click the "Send this question to the question pool" option in the gray box of the "Answer Question" interface to add a question to the pool. When an expert's account is deactivated for any reason, questions still in his/her pending queue are sent to the pool.
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What about my average response time and timeliness ratings? |
When a question is moved to the pool, the system emails the original questioner to inform them that they should not expect an answer. We don't want to keep anyone waiting, so if they do receive an answer, they should be pleasantly surprised. Questions taken from the question pool are excluded from the average response time calculation used to rank volunteers for the Top Time Award. In addition, questioners can not input timeliness ratings for questions answered from the pool. Unlike regular questions, there is no one waiting for an answer, so there is really no rush to respond.
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Why would I answer questions from the pool? |
Answering a question from the pool may or may not help the original questioner, but it definitely will help future visitors to this site. Here are a few examples from the
Vacuum-Cleaners,
Auto,
Marriage,
Medical-Research, and HVAC categories to see what I mean.
Answering questions from the pool also helps those who need your help find you. Most questioners find our site because they've typed their question into a search engine. The more Q&A pages you have published in the archive, the higher the likelihood that one of them will be listed in search engine results.
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Why would I send a question to the pool? |
- The question pool comes in handy if you suddenly need to put yourself on vacation (things come up unexpectedly, and we understand) and you don't have the time to respond your pending questions. You can send the unanswered questions to the pool so you don't receive those pesky reminder emails.
- You can also use the question pool feature to refer questions to another expert if you know there is another volunteer in your category who can post a better answer. Before we had the pool, volunteers had to do this or this. While most of the time that works out fine, experts now have another option: send the question to the pool, and then use the AllExperts interface to let that particular expert know that there is a question in the pool that may be of interest to him/her. This way, the other expert can review the question, decide if they want to answer it, and if they do, get the kudos for their response.
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