Post History

Now that we are getting some activity on the EE site, I'm discovering some features I used more than I realized on SE.

On SE, you could go to your <i>activity &gt; reputation</i> and see all the recent votes you received.  You could also look at your question and/or answer history sorted by rep.  I miss both those, and would like to have them here.

The first is very useful to get a sense for what is currently going over well with the users.  Usually the first thing I did on SE each day was look at the rep changes over the last day.  Over the years, I got better at judging what kind of writing, presentation, and topics people will like, but it never got to the point where there wasn't a surprise now and then.  I found this a good way to get aggregated feedback from the "customers".

I could also watch the "trend of the week" or what a popular homework assignment was.  For example, if five answers all having to do with ethernet hardware got upvoted, I could tell that someone was doing digging on that subject.  If each got just one upvote, then it was probably a single user doing their research.  If there were multiple upvotes, it was usually a homework assignment.

These users would find related answers that I had long forgotten about.  Sometimes that would lead to editing them to reference each other, be more consistent, and on rare occasions uncover duplicates that should be closed or merged.

Seeing my answers for the topic-of-the-day also helped a lot in detecting duplicate questions.  Often there would be new questions on the same topic that old answers were upvoted about.  Without having just seen the upvoted answers, I probably would have forgotten they existed, and lots of duplicates would not have been caught.

It was also useful to be alerted to downvotes.  Sometimes they were just due to vandals or retribution, but every once in a while they pointed out something I could edit a bit to make better.

Occasionally I'd look at the top answers list.  Those were the ones people were reading regularly, so sometimes I'd go back and spruce them up a bit.  Without a list, I would have forgotten about most of those, or not know which ones were worth some additional effort.