Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers blog

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