Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers blog

It’s time for another product release, which means new features and enhancements for Answers. As we’ve said before, the top priority for our team is to make sure you have a pleasant experience using our site, and that low quality Q&A does not get in your way. In this release, we’ve added tools that help us progress towards meeting our goals.  

What’s New?

Home Page: I’m sure you’ve already noticed the changes to the Answers Home Page in this release. The biggest change is the new featured content area which highlights the Best of Answers. Everyone likes seeing great content on Answers, so we’ve made some adjustments to our processes for surfacing the best content that the site has to offer. The Best of Answers is a dedicated space to showcase quality, smart, and interesting Q&A. So, keep an eye out – your question or answer may get featured as part of the Best of Answers!

Best Answer Percentage: By request, we’ve updated the avatar rollover to include best answer percentages. Now you can see whether a user has been contributing best answers to the site, without having to click through to his or her profile page. This feature is a step towards adding recognition into the system for users who are contributing best answers across the site.

Answer Filtering: In our last release, we added the ability to sort answers by rating — bringing highly rated answers to the top of the answer list. This time we’ve added even more control over how you view answers by including the option to collapse answers based on community ratings. Also, your sorting preferences will stick across questions and answers throughout Yahoo! Answers, so if you prefer, you can choose to exclusively view answers that the community has marked with thumbs-up ratings.

Question Categorization: We heard your complaints about questions being categorized improperly, and we agree. So, we came up with a solution. Now, when you ask a question, Answers will suggest a list of categories for you so you can now categorize your questions quickly and easily. This new feature will also help improve your experience browsing categories in Answers, as wrongly categorized questions should show up less frequently in your favorite categories.

Address Book: Ever wanted to email your friend a great question? Well, now it’s easy to send Answers content to anyone in your address book. Our email a friend form now accesses your address book, so when you click on the email icon in the action bar you will have access to all of the email addresses stored in your address book.

The Answers team is already hard at work on the next round of product features aimed at improving the quality of the site, so please continue to let us know what you think by sending us feedback in the forum. We hope you are enjoying Answers as much as the team enjoys working on new features.

–Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team