Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers blog

t’s that time of the year again! Fighting through crowded shopping streets, decorating the tree, sending Christmas cards, cooking mince pies…

But how many of you all remember the original meaning of Christmas? A recent survey showed that less than half of British children are aware that Jesus was born on Christmas Day!

The word “Christmas” is the contraction of “Christ’s mass”, and came into use through the English medieval custom of celebrating mass at midnight on Christmas Eve. Christmas is not just a single feast day; it is actually a season that extends four weeks before Christmas Day (the Advent) and for two weeks after (ending with the Epiphany). The term “Advent” means “coming”, a period of expectation and hope during which Christians prepare for the Christmas season, waiting for the coming of the Messiah.

The practice of giving gifts to family members goes back to the 15th century but only became well established towards the end of the 18th Century. It was during Queen Victoria’s reign that customs such as sending cards, decorating trees and the myth of Father Christmas really took off.

The tradition of Father Christmas has its origin in the 4th century. This myth is based on an actual person, St. Nicholas. Nicholas was a Christian leader from Turkey who wanted to give money to poor people without them knowing it. The story tells that one day, he climbed the roof of a house to drop a purse of money down the chimney of a poor family, which is the origin of the belief that Father Christmas comes down the chimney to bring us gifts.

These days some people complain about the commercial aspect of Christmas and its extended celebration. But the “spirit” of Christmas is still there: despite the fact that so many children in the UK don’t actually know that we are celebrating the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day, the meaning of this feast for them is more about giving than receiving presents and about thinking of others, which shows that Christmas isn’t just all about commercialization, but a real celebration of togetherness, love and joy. Christmas for most of us is about sharing and we all have our own favourite Christmas traditions.

Don’t forget to check our Christmas category for last-minute gift ideas, recipe suggestions, and to generally enhance your festive knowledge.

The Answers Team wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Thank you for joining us for our first Christmas at Yahoo! Answers.

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

We have now taken the next step in our plan to aggressively and pro-actively combat trolls on Yahoo! Answers, and while the secrets of our new system must be kept safely guarded, we can discuss some of the ideas behind our new approach to combating troll abuse.

Abuse is essentially misuse – for all intents and purposes. Trolls and spammers specifically take the features on Answers that we all have access to and misuse them for their own purposes. So essentially, one of the key facets to our new defence system is preventing the misuse of some of Answers’ key features.

We realize that this is vague, but rest assured that the team has put a lot of work into this next phase in troll prevention. We take this type of abuse very seriously, and we have much more planned for the New Year. While we ready the next stage of our plan to combat trolls and spammers, you can continue to help us out by vigorously reporting abuse. Your reports help, so keep them coming. Also send us your feedback in the forums.

For a little reminder of what constitutes abuse you may want to check out this previous blog post.

Thank you,

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

We appreciate many of you are unhappy with some of your content being deleted for what may seem like trivial or non-existent reasons. Additionally many of you regularly see content which you find offensive and would prefer was removed. To ensure that everyone has a positive experience on Yahoo! Answers we have the community guidelines in place.

Here is a reminder of a few of our guidelines because breaking them may lead to your posts being deleted or your account suspended.

• Do not answer offensive questions: Report them! Often you will see questions that are offensive and whilst it is tempting to jump in with a rebuke, this could often lead to you being penalised for your behaviour. Report the question/answer instead and leave it to us to remove unpleasant posts.
• Profanity: If you spell an offensive word by adding a `*`, it is still profanity and will be deleted costing you 10 points.
• “I don’t know”: This is not an answer to a question and will be deleted. If you don’t know the answer, don’t answer!
• “you fool”, “dumbass” (or other insult): Sometimes you may add a comment to your answer directed towards the questioner. Even in jest this could be construed as offensive and will lead to a deletion, and the loss of 10 of your points…
• Chatting, for example “who likes steak?” or “what should I have for breakfast?”: Answers is a place for people to ask and answer questions in order to share knowledge, not a place to chat. Please keep your postings to a question and answer format, or they may be deleted when we receive a complaint. If you prefer to have discussions or chat with others, please use another Yahoo! service , such as message boards.
• Commercial activity/adding URLs: We positively encourage supporting urls in your answers. However these need to be relevant to the question you are answering. If you want to give out a general url, to your blog for example, use your profile for this, not your answers.
• Yahoo! Answers is no more accepting of racist, bigoted comments and posts than society in general. We do not tolerate the promotion of hate and will not hesitate to take it further.

Think before you jump in with flippant comments, it may cost you points…

As always we’d love to hear what you think about the abuse levels on Answers and our community guidelines so please leave your comments below.

–Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

With so many readily available low-cost flights, many of us don’t think much of hopping on a plane for a weekend break or short holiday. Armed with a guidebook and a sense of adventure, the world is in easier reach than ever before but for how long? We’re being asked to consider the impact of our holidays now, not whether we can afford them but whether the planet can.

Tony Wheeler, founder of the legendary Lonely Planet travel books is tackling just that as he asks: “How do we make travelling world wide a sustainable thing in the long term?”

Tony’s own enthusiasm for travel, a passion that turned into a career started when he took a six month overland trip through Asia with his wife Maureen in 1972. They ended up in Sydney, Australia with less than a dollar between them but by the following year they had set up Lonely Planet Publications to publish ‘Across Asia on the Cheap’, the story of their journey. Today, Lonely Planet guidebooks are often thought of as backpacker’s bibles. For a couple that have spent so much of their lives traveling, Tony and Maureen still love to leave most of the hard work to their capable 400-strong staff and spend six months of the year visiting far flung corners of the globe.

Check him out posing his question and consider your thoughts because we’d all like to know how it’s possible to continue to travel but care more about the places we love.

Tourism is one of the world’s largest industries and it’s estimated that by 2020, 1.5billion of us will be travelling each year. Far flung places are no longer just distant fantasies, and not restricted to the young. Older generations especially the over-50 ‘empty nesters’ whose children have left home are leading the way, with destinations such as South America and China top of their list.

In Britain, most of us (around 80%) are concerned about climate change. Around 35% believe that it’s us humans causing the problem and that’s partly linked to air travel, which is why there’s been much recent publicity around calculating our carbon footprints and carbon-offsetting.

What is it? Carbon-offsetting is our way of giving something back to nature. Traditionally planting trees to neutralize the negative impact that flights and the amount of carbon dioxide they produce have on the atmosphere. Put simply: If traveling in a sustainable way should be that we do little or no damage to the country by going there, can we justify that a return flight to Rome, for example, produces over 0.31 tonnes of carbon dioxide which is as bad for the environment as leaving the kettle boiling for 16 days solid. However, that flight to Italy only costs £2.45 to offset and it’s not just about planting trees…

Specialist organisation Climate Care, who operates offset schemes on behalf of UK travel companies (such as First Choice and Travelcare) puts 20% of its funding towards planting trees with the rest going to micro-loans in the developing world where the emissions are being off-set in inventive ways. In India, farmers irrigating crops have been able to replace diesel water pumps with manual ones to cut a massive 0.65 tonnes of CO2 per pump each year. They also distributed 10,000 energy efficient lightbulbs to schools and homes in Kazakhstan and run projects across the globe.

Answerers have already been discussing how to reduce their own carbon emissions closer to home and whether countries with famous tourist attractions such as Machu Picchu in Peru need to address the balance between how they need to be preserved and how many visitors are too many.

Ideas are what we need! How best can we limit the damage caused by travel? Let Tony and the Answers team know yours as we undertake this great travel debate.

–Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team

Christmas is traditionally a time of big movie releases, and this year is no exception with major blockbusters such as Deja-vu, the fantasy epic Eragon and the star-studded The Holiday to look forward to. 

This year however, we also have something different.  We have Answers to check out film recommendations, find out which are rotten tomatoes, and to solve those annoying bits of movie trivia, such as the name of the song being played on the radio at the start of Jaws, how Quadrophenia got its’ name or the name of the English village where The Holiday was filmed.  The breadth of knowledge of Answers users in this category never fails to shock, is there a release date that you guys aren’t aware of?!   

With a recent question from Jerry Bruckheimer, we have the chance to find out from you what really makes an edge of the seat suspense thriller.  What makes a movie work for you?  Some of you can certainly get fanatical over films and watch certain ones again and again – what is it about a movie that makes us do this? 

By incorporating some of the knowledge given in response to Jerry’s question, maybe in a year’s time we will see Yahoo! Answers – The Movie.  But what would you include in a movie about Yahoo! Answers?

–Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team