First off I apologize for your bad experience with the Anonymous questions, we have been receiving lots of feedback on the features and unfortunately for us most of it has been negative. The reason we are seeing so many is because in the most recent Mahalo upgrade we added Anonymous question boxes to every Mahalo page, a lot of people are using them...this is good. A lot of people are also abusing them...this is bad.

I've been working lots of hours this week doing nothing more then cleaning up the Anonymous questions and/or clarifying others - Many members have also been reporting the bad questions so this cleans them up quickly. The problem is no matter how quickly we clean them up, they still appear on the Front Page regardless. As others have mentioned is that Anonymous questions are brand new and we are still testing and seeing comes out of it. Mahalo Answers is also in the middle of a major upgrade, one that will include filters so that is one solution in the works and hopefully some other throttling tools will be made available for us moderators to keep the FP a bit cleaner.

Thanks for your patience
Jeff Hoard
Community Manager.

It just happened a week before or so . Much of anonymous questions are incomprehensible , 80% of such questions can be comprehended by reading ABOUT that question ( youcan see it just bellow those questions) .Some questions are annoying ( some ppl r asking about sex tapes and blue film's URLs, i anwered few of them too ) its very unfortunate that mahalo provides no filter . However i can say certainly that this provision increased the number of questions in the site . now i can see atleast 10-20 questions per hour now . im very happy with that . i hope this provision is aimed to bring muhc traffic in to this .
I have few solution to make this provision much more effective, fun and less annoying . as mahalo going to turn it off soon i dont think they need it .
You missed a lot in these months , mahalo is really happening these days , lotsa interesting questions and topics were asked and answered.
Though me never been to askville you can pick quality questions by sorting out the questions with MOST INTERESTIONG FIRST tab .

"There is a powerful tension in our relationship to technology. We are excited by egalitarianism and anonymity, but we constantly fight for our identity.” - david owen

Hey, Mritty! It's been a long time since our days on Askville! I've missed you, you giant Mickey Mouse man, you!

Okay, as other answerers have pointed out, this feature just went into effect and is predictably drawing a lot of negative attention from spammy/immature users. I think that we can safely predict this is going to die down once the novelty wears off.

No - this is not turning into Askville. I think I can speak with at least a little authority on how this compares to Askville and its giant sewer slide.

The Askville Difference
````````````````````````````````
1. When Askville implemented anonymous questions/answers, they did so without providing much of any staff assistance in the way of preventing/removing garbage questions. They always stated they'd prefer the community to largely self-police. Remember how dozens of people could report a foul question and it wouldn't get removed for a week? This isn't true here, where the staff is VERY actively involved day and night to help maintain quality.

2. Askville's roll-out of anonymous questions came very shortly before Bonus Questions appeared. And after the novelty of anonymity wore off, Bonus Questions were the largest offenders.

3. Mahalo really does care about quality over quantity. This isn't an offshoot site of a store like Amazon. This site is all about user experience and quality information, so you know that they're counting on spam control as much as we are.

4. Some Answers users have been given the very special privilege to remove questions that are inappropriate/spammy. So there are a bunch of deputies out there working to keep the site in good order.

All I can say is buckle up, because Mahalo's in the middle of a whole bunch of exciting changes that will benefit the community and the site managers equally. When things settle I think even you, @Mritty, the eternal pessimist, will be very happy with how things are. :D

Welcome back!

It hasn't been around all that long. Less than two weeks. It's still in the testing phase I do believe. I was talking to one of the developers on IRC today and he said that Mahalo was already considering at least doing away with it because of the liability of them not knowing who asked the questions.

I've also heard rumor at a certain percent of spam Jason said he would turn them off. (Jeff is keeping track I think it's currently at about 20%) I can't confirm that one.

I sure hope they turn them back off though. It was a great idea that just did not work out as planned and is making answers less appealing. I know I've been focusing more on tasks since the anon. questions took over mahalo.

When the new 3.0 release of mahalo answers comes out they have also promised a filter so that you can just not look at them even if they don't get turned off.

:)

Over all I would say Mahalo is still worth coming back too.

Thanks for adding another voice complaining about this new feature. I complained a few days ago.

Mahalo is trying to increase the number of questions by making it easier to ask and not requiring signing up. It is backfiring and clogging the site with trash. Not only that, but the askers can't give additional details.

Maybe they will solve the problem with filters, which have been needed for other reasons for a long time.