Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers blog

Back in October, Yahoo! redesigned the core profile pages, giving them a fresh new look and feel, and additional functionality. These new profiles allow you to manage your image and establish connections with your friends and family, as well share information on what you’re up to on third-party sites like YouTube and Twitter.  All of this can be done right from your new profile on Yahoo! at http://profiles.yahoo.com

So how does this relate to Yahoo! Answers?  Currently, the image that displays for each user in Answers is brought in from each user’s 360 profile. In the coming weeks, Answers will start using profiles to display your image rather than 360.

Many of you use other Yahoo! services on a regular basis and we want to make it easier for you to manage your display image across all of our services.  By doing this, you’ll be able to update your profile image in one place and it will represent you wherever you go on the Yahoo! network.

We understand some of you opt to use a different image on Answers than what you use on other Yahoo! services. To confirm the image that we will soon be displaying on Answers we recommend that you go to http://profiles.yahoo.com now and activate your new profile. Once you’re there, you’ll be asked to confirm some information that you’ve previously shared with Yahoo! and select the image you’d like to share with the Answers community.

If you have never used other Yahoo! services and do not activate your profile, your image will show up as the “Grey Face”.

For those of you who display an avatar on Answers – don’t worry.  This won’t change.  Both avatars and nicknames will continue to remain the same on Answers.

We want to make the transition to your new profiles on Yahoo! as straight forward as possible for you. So go to http://profiles.yahoo.com now and let us know what you think of it!

Have more questions? Leave us a comment and let us know!

Here in the Yahoo! Answers Team we’re always busy working towards making the site better. Most days it means behind-the-scenes work but some days it yields visible results: today is one of those days.

We’ve heard from you guys for a while now how frustrated you are that the Leaderboards weren’t quite right and rest assured we were just as frustrated as you. What added to this frustration is that the technology behind them, that counted thousands of millions of users’ points, wasn’t as straightforward to fix as we might have liked, hence why it’s taken a short while for us to put them right.

But we’re excited to announce that the Category Leaderboards are now accurate and updated. We working on a fix for the overall and weekly Leaderboards, which we will let you know about as soon as it has been completed. As part of this we are also correcting how we calculate Best Answer percentages to ignore deleted Best Answers. This is long overdue: many thanks for being so patient.

These changes may affect you in different ways. The Category Leaderboards will now be more accurate, reflecting recent points and deleted questions and answers. As a consequence some of you will be promoted up the boards, similarly others might slip down a little. Remember that Leaderboards are based on the country who’s Yahoo! Terms of Service you sign. So for example only users that signed the French Terms of Service will be seen in the French Leaderboards.

Many thanks for your patience on this, we hope this one small step toward Answers and all its users having an amazing 2009.

– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers Team