Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers blog

It has been over a week since we released the new beta of community moderation. The early results are very, very promising. You, the Answers community, are removing the most abusive questions and answers within minutes! And the average time to remove abuse is getting faster and faster each day. Accuracy rates are equally impressive and also improving daily. We manually review each report and have found that abuses removed through the new system have a better than 98% accuracy rate. We’ve kept the system in a conservative mode for now (to see how it performs) by focusing on the most abusive or blatant violations and it is working. You are doing great!

Of course, there are many improvements to be made. We are progressively tuning the system to make things better, reviewing thousands of abuse reports to determine if our algorithms are effective at identifying the most trusted reporters. Some of you have asked about the exact way we measure a trusted reporter, but we can’t release this information. It would be like Yahoo! Mail telling people how they determine spam email from good email. If you report well and participate responsibly in the community, you become trusted and have more impact in the community.

We will be updating you regularly on the progress of community moderation, especially as we expand the system based on the early success.

Congrats and thanks to all of you who are taking an active role to keep Answers healthy and growing!

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team
P.S. We also want to encourage you to report more spam.