^^^ This is basically the summary of the work I've been doing. Please - don't hesitate to add / edit as you see fit. I'm hoping to form a consolidated plan when it comes to promotion over the long term.

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun Thanks... I hope you don't feel like I was beating a dead horse there... I just remembered seeing that you were still restricted to your smartphone for access.

Congrats on the move, btw! I hope all is going well with the new house :)

@TimPost Fantastic! I hope we can get some good participation with our users on the discussion, although I think you've really nailed the most salient points.

Interestingly enough on the topic of experts, I feel like there's been an odd mix of those who self-identify as parenting professionals on the site.

@Beofett Here's hoping - Yes, I noticed going through users that some (appear to) work as a counselor in some capacity yet didn't participate much

Some of the best professional participants I've seen have been speech-language pathologists (a profession I must admit I had never heard of prior to seeing them on our site)

We've had a number of teachers, and at least one active librarian

Yet I've seen very few, if any, pediatricians or physicians.

The only that I recall seeing were, quite frankly, giving advice that was so bad I have to question their legitimacy

That's why I like the idea of more personalized introduction and recruitment of these folks. It also adds more solid legitimacy if another user can vouch for them if needed.

@TimPost Yeah, I noticed that the worse the advice, the more likely they were to loudly declare how many years of experience they had

@Beofett Eerily reminiscent of various Wikipedians, no? :)

@TimPost I do my best to avoid looking at the page notes discussions on wikipedia, unless it's for specific amusement value (such as the Paul Revere revision page after Sarah Palin's infamous quote, or the Stack Overflow page during a particularly fun edit war) :P

They should have a popcorn icon for when those things get interesting.

@TimPost They seem to tend to snowball rather quickly as it is :)

Well, nobody has come out hating the meta post, sure hope it does some good.

30+ views in 8 hours is pretty good for our meta, even with the featured tag

@Beofett Tim just mentioned brilliant people's tendency towards OCD - welcome to the club :-) Every adjustment/correction helps, and I'd be the last person to complain about beating dead horses. I'm just as OCD as the next lunatic.

House construction is basically complete -- we moved in last week, and today I finished putting flooring on the terrasse. But we're not all set yet: the internal doors and door frames were only delivered today, many weeks after their promised arrival date. The delivery guy from a subcontractor told me they've had the doors lying around for ages but the house company (who ordered them for me) apparently didn't have the cash flow to actually pay for them. No payment = no wares.... :-(

The house company gave me a straight-up lie about delivery delays and such. I guess they can't very well tell their direct customer sorry but we're broke so we can't order your parts for you. o_O

But the stuff finally arrived, and we know a carpenter or two who can install the doors. And that's the last part of the house, so we're basically done. The garage and the garden still need work but that's not important once the house is complete.

@Beofett 30 views (47 right now) is quite spectacular, in fact. Maybe there's more meta interest than I expected. This is great news.

Also, @TimPost, great post (both the Q and the A). It shows that you've been working on this a good while before posting it!

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun wow... just... wow :( That's pretty horrible.

I'm glad you're getting it sorted out in the end.

yep, that's why I'm glad this is happening now and not early in the project. That would really freak me out.

We had a new bathroom installed last year, and that was a real pain.... I can't even begin to imagine building a house from scratch

If they go bust now, I'm still allright (except that probably nobody will continue the warranty).

I guess having the interior doors late is better than having the exterior doors late :P

I guess we're very lucky that we lived in an apartment 700 meters from here, so it was easy to go check on progress several times a week, and be there immediately when deliveries were made. It must be hard to alter your exsting home if you don't have a second bathroom to use in the meantime.

@Beofett Ha! Well, the exterior door (complete with dangling keys!) and the windows were already preinstalled into the walls at the factory, so when they moved the walls onto the foundation (with a big crane), the outer shell was basically already complete!

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun We actually were renovating our second bathroom, so that we could have an actual bathtub to wash Hunter in (instead of two showers)

unfortunately for us, the owner two prior to us fancied himself a "do-it-yourself" kind of guy... we've been steadily correcting the horrible decisions he made since we moved in

(using the Internet via the smartphone's shared Wifi connection is remarkably unnoticeable. wow.)

he built the downstairs bathroom himself, and it showed

@Beofett uh-oh.... DIY is only good if you know what you're doing... I've seen ghastly pics over at DIY.SE

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun I'd have placed Internet installation slightly higher in priority than doors (interior and exterior)... but then, my wife would have over-ruled that :P

I've done some parts of this house myself, to save on costs. But many things were done professionally because it needs to work, and it needs to last!

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun heh you should see our furnace/air conditioning room... you have to literally remove a wall to change the filter

@Beofett well yes, we would too, technically. Even my wife. But she's got a UMTS dongle on her laptop and I've got this phone link, so we're not in total pain. And it turns out that getting Internet is harder than planned because they need to lay the actual copper first!

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun yikes!

@Beofett sounds like a clever guy. The kind of guy where you wonder how he survived the chlorine in the gene pool.

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun My wife actually has better gadgets than I do (she runs an IT department at her work), so she has a portable wifi air card and a tablet. That doesn't help my video gaming addiction much, though :P

@Beofett well, we thought the cable was going to enter our lot here but we only learned from the cable company after we had buried the conduit that they were going to have it enter over there instead. And it should already be there. So I dig around, but haven't found their part of the cable yet. I don't think they actually delivered it. But their plans show it's there. Maybe deeper??

@Beofett oooh a tech geek as a SO! envy! :-D

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun we also had to remove a concrete motorcycle ramp that formed the inside doorjam to the basement (yet only extended down to about 2 inches above the floor)

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun actually, she's not a tech geek (although that's changing over time). She just has a department of tech geeks that reports directly to her

Hah. I guess we can continue exchanging battle stories all night :-) but I didn't want to distract from Tim's important post.

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun too true... I'm excited to get some progress on promotion

Incidentally, I emailed Trent, the author of thesimpledollar.com blog, to thank him for his parenting advice, and invite him to participate in the site

not exactly the type of expert we've been talking about, but I don't think his financial advice for parents would go amiss here

I'm still slightly worried about Christine's objection that too many non-experts provide (in an expert's opinion) bad advice, and other non-experts support that. Actual expert content is not recognized and upvoted sufficiently, which is frustrating. Too frustrating for her.

I understand her concern, and I understand that she left because of this. It's like watching kids do dangerous stuff while their parents watch and not interfere. Can't save the world...

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun Part of the problem is: how do we determine the real experts from the pretenders?

Clearly Christine, and several others who participated and then left, are experts

but as I mentioned earlier, I've seen some incredibly bad advice posted here from self-professed professional experts

@Beofett I've been posting suitable comments to relevant posts on his blog, with links to Parenting.SE, but I don't see that it's doing much. I'm following Trent's blog but he has not linked to us himself - yet.

@Beofett that's very hard to verify. I recall somebody who claimed to be a professional (like Christine), with a website (like Christine), but (unlike Christine) the content was as horrible as the answers here.

Hey @TimPost do you think it would be acceptable if you would approach Christine for an informal talk? She might have some helpful comments (from a professional's perspective!) on how to steer the site around the obstacles she noticed. I had a short series of very long emails with her at the time of her departure; I could introduce you but only if you request it.

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun I also remember the self-proclaimed pediatrician with over a decade of experience who claimed that a child who had been potty trained, but who had shown signs of reverting, probably had worms

@Beofett we can't really vet the contributors (who? how? what criteria? etc) so just as everywhere else online, users must either naively trust what they read, or take an educated critical approach (or just a bit of common sense) to figure it out for themselves. I think we as moderators are doing a good job of screening the actual posts of new users, so that obvious maladvice is detected and edited.

@Beofett as they say, on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog. We'll have to let readers apply their own brains. But it wouldn't hurt to point it out to readers somehow -- I think that a mod's comment on such a blatant post is sufficient to remind readers of this.

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun a possible angle of attack might involve revisiting our criteria of "backed by references or personal experience"... perhaps there might be a way to separate some questions into distinct categories that would indicate whether answers based on personal experience would be acceptable or not

an interesting thought. I'll let that simmer in my mind as I go to bed now :-) yawn!

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun Have a good night! :)

and a nice weekend to you! just in case I don't find time to come back online soonish :-D

over and out