If you have 5-10 minutes, we’d love to get your feedback on Sphinn via a new member survey that we’re launching today. Before you start the survey, though, please read this:

Survey Details

1.) The survey has about 50 multiple-choice questions with one open-ended, tell-us-whatever-is-on-your-mind question at the end.

2.) It should take about 5-10 minutes to complete. You can’t start, stop, and come back later. (sorry)

3.) You can take the survey anonymously.

4.) If you give us your name and contact info at the end, we’ll enter you in a drawing to win a nice prize (and you can actually choose which prize you want).

5.) Closing date: June 30, end of day (U.S. Pacific-time).

Why a Survey?

I mentioned last week that we’re very interested in member feedback as we prepare for the next evolution of Sphinn. We’ve had a meeting with some of our members at SMX Advanced, we’ve received some great ideas in this Sphinn thread, and we want to get even more feedback and ideas from our members.

Yes, the survey may seem a bit on the long side, but we think it’s best to err by asking for too much feedback than asking for too little.

Ready?

The survey is open now, and will remain open until end-of-day (U.S. Pacific-time) on June 30 — that’s next Wednesday. If you don’t have time to take it right now, you’ve got more than a week. If you’re ready to take the survey now, here’s the link:

Thanks in advance for giving us your time and opinions! We’ll use your feedback to guide us as we make the next round of upgrades and improvements to Sphinn.

- Matt McGee,
Sphinn Editor-in-Chief

Introductions may not be needed because you probably know these folks already. In any case, please join me in giving a warm welcome to our five new Sphinn Editors:

Glen Allsopp
Debra Mastaler
Todd Mintz
Mat Siltala
David Wallace

Glen now has the distinction of being the only person on the Sphinn admin/editor staff whose last name begins with anything from the first half of the alphabet.

I should point out, too, that we’ve killed off the term “moderator” to describe these folks. “Editor” better represents what they do because, by looking for content that’s worthy of being manually promoted to the home page, they’re helping to edit Sphinn in much the same way editors work in other industries/sites. Yes, we’re all involved in policing spam and other quality control issues, too, but “moderator” isn’t the right term for what the role entails. So, “editor” it is.

As always, questions/concerns/ideas and other feedback can be shared with any one of us. We’re always open to hearing from Sphinn members. If you don’t have our direct email addresses, feel free to use the contact form to get in touch.

We’ve started putting ideas on paper (well, e-mail) for upgrades and new ideas we want to implement here on Sphinn. Oh, and there’ll be some bug fixes in there, too. We already have a good, long list of ideas — enough to make me think we might skip “Sphinn 2.2″ and go straight to 2.5 or maybe even 3.0. But these are early days, and we don’t even have a roadmap or timeframe at this point.

What we do know, though, is that we want your feedback and input.

Actually, we’ve already started collecting feedback. Last week at SMX Advanced, we hosted a small, informal lunch with a few Sphinn members — some who are active now, some who haven’t been as active recently as they were in the past; some who are active in voting, some who are more active in commenting/submitting. It was a great lunch that helped us understand more about our users, the things they like and dislike about Sphinn, and the things we need to do better. I’ll say it again to those who joined us: thank you!

If you weren’t at that lunch, my hope/goal is that we’ll do more of these in the future — perhaps at our SMX East conference in October? And at other SMX conferences, too? I hope so.

In the meantime, we’d also appreciate your feedback outside of planned events like that. In the next couple days, we hope to launch a general survey of our members asking for feedback on a variety of things about your Sphinn usage and new ideas/features. We’ll post here on the blog when that’s ready and put it on the Sphinn home page, too, to make sure the most users are aware of it.

Until then, here’s one question: We’re considering some kind of icon, or maybe a different color, to distinguish stories that are manually promoted to the home page. What’s your opinion?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and feedback as we continue to evolve the site.