How can we motivate the community to give better, faster answers?

So there are times when FunAdvice gets large backlog of unanswered questions, mostly on the weekend, or late at night US time or early morning US time. Ideally, everybody who asks is motivated to answer, and everybody who visits the site is motivated to...

"pitch in" because that's what makes the site really work.

However, as we've been growing like crazy, and we have a small team managing the site...it's really hard to keep up with it all, and a LOT falls through the cracks. Is there something we could do to motivate everybody to give faster answers, and sometimes, better ones? At times, the answer that gets posted is "I don't know" which then makes the person give up on FunAdvice, because they never get a good answer.

Any ideas appreciated Thanks.

delete all the questions that have been on for several years beacause I find them on fun advice and the person who asked the question has not visted the site in years so delete them.

well I think the percentage for the best answers is a very good idea but no everyone apllies it and if there will be a better method for doing that it will be amazing & on this website shouldn't be people that will ask questions like "am I nice " ??? Thats totaly useless ...

Yes I agree with the above advice, in the fact that I have started to give a serious answer to a three year old question and then thought "what's the use"

Now, I know that the questions that come in my email are new questions and I do work to answer all the ones that I can answer but many times I do not have a good answer and I agree with thedude that to say I don't know is not a good answer and would frustrate someone. It would me.

As far as motivation goes, I have found some sort of reward or recognition, no matter how small is a good motivator. Is there anyway you can do something like this?

I hate to keep referring to eBay (it is where I have the most knowledge) but like they have a "Colored Star" system that after so many feedbacks the star changes color and it is sort of like a promotion. Whenever the star changes colors eBay sends out a "Congratulations Letter" Of course you would want to think up your own system, not one like theirs but something of that nature.

We've actually had the debate over a "levels" system at least 3 times over the past year and a half. I even wrote up a very long desription of how it would work.

Then my business partner shot it down. Fact is, all of the larger Q&A sites have such a system in place.

Would that be enough?

And, re: the 3 year old questions with no answers...we're going to do something about those soon.

We need a better "unanswered questions" filter. When I click on it, it gives me 2 questions from the past few minutes, and the rest from over 3 years ago. GAH!

I would have thought we already had a pretty good motivation system here: give fast, sound, caring advice, you get promoted to advisor. And that shiny button is sooo shiiiny...

I agree with lex_icon,
I know that you and 'edior' really want us to answer the unanswered questions. I would like to do that because I often run out of questions to answer. So, I click on the un-answered tab. Problem is, the questions at the top are like 2-3 years old. I don't see a point in answering questions from that long ago.