How do we encourage good question creation?

Although I see a point in deducting additional $H for voided questions, but I also see a potential for arguments about the voids since a loss of funds is involved...maybe a deduction after a certain number of questions have been voided...so as to allow new creators a learning opportunity...just thoughts, anyone else?

Yes, possibly after your first 5 questions the losing of additional funds comes into play.
Also maybe the cat ed who is voiding can have the extra funds not taken away for a special reason (ie: user does not understand clear question creation)

Secondly, what if someone has invested the money (all of their money) and a question of theirs is voided?

I like all of the ideas given by Tom...my only concern about the money issue was to allow some earnings (particularly for newbies) to help players build up some funds....maybe limited the reward to the first five successful questions created...but if not, that's fine...just as long as we get more people involved in the creation of questions...

Thanks for the reply

I particularly like #2 & #3 of Tom's ideas.

Good question, Bayoubear! I've been trying to figure this out myself. I noticed my site visits dropped off quite a bit a few weeks ago and realized I was losing interest in the questions in general. I certainly may stand corrected, but it seems over time a relatively small number of users were asking a disproportionate number of questions. That is all cool and kudos to them for doing it. However, it seemed to me to have precipitated two things: 1) a number of people were asking questions just for the sake of asking a huge number of questions, many of which had a rather narrow interest, and 2) the vast majority of users were not asking any questions at all for some reason. Why this may have been happening, I do not know. Somebody suggested adding discussion forums. That is a great idea and might fuel interest from some of our 'silent' members. Also, having a question leaderboard based solely on the number of individual users who responded to a question, rather than H$ wagered. I sense the general populace is losing interest. Again, great question!

@Tom - How about "Average # of Individual Predictors per Question"? This would encourage interesting questions while simultaneously discouraging people from creating hundreds of 'narrow interest' questions just to get their total number up. Personally I would rather see people filling the question slots with 5-10 interesting question submissions per month rather than 200 questions about how fast some celebrity's toenails are growing. The latter simply serves to knock the interesting questions out of prominence and thereby reduces the number of people who see and wager on them. Maybe a minimum of 5 questions would have to be asked to qualify for question ranking and the ranking could be reset on the first of each month. Downplaying quantity to encourage quality would be a step in the right direction.

Hey everyone, Ive been reading this forum and I just wanted to say that rewarding the question creators is something I always thought should be a part of the site.
I think one way to do it would be to reward the creator at by the number of correctly settled questions. Maybe every time you reach a certain "level" throw in a bonus.
An example:
beginner
level 1 20 questions settled (and $H500 bonus)
level 2 50 questions ($H1,000 bonus)
level 3 100 questions ($H2,500 bonus)
level 4 200 questions ($H5,000 bonus)
level 5 500 questions ($H10,000 bonus)
You can have an icon similar to Super user indicating what question creation level each user is.
If you stress the fact that the questions have to be settled to count, this will help encourage quality questions.

I don't think we can base question quality on users or H$ alone. For example, some questions have awful suspend/settlement times which makes it easy to gain a little dough if you time it right. For example: "Will company X's stock reach $50/share by the end of the month? Suspends: last day @ 11:59pm". We've all done it - it's after (the real live) market closing so you dump loads of change into the question. The return isn't good but it's safe and pays out in a couple of hours. Those questions have tons of users and tons of H$ but they're not really quality questions.

I was thinking about this some and came up with an off-the -wall solution that defeats this problem. Ready? Base the quality on users or H$ bet on the wrong answer(s). Crazy. Hear me out. If the market settles at 99% that's a bad question with a bunch of people obviously gaming the system. In that case the 1% voting on the wrong answer would tip you off and the quality reward should stink appropriately. However if the market closes at 60% that's a pretty good question and the 40% multiplied by users and/or H$ should reward accordingly.

This would reward people for creating popular, quality questions.