Improving Answers
- Can we do better? Tell us here…
Over the years since it launched, Answers has grown and grown. In March ‘09 we had 177.8 million monthly unique visitors worldwide according to comScore. We have 680 million answers live globally and 100 million questions.
We receive an average of 173,000 questions a day globally. This breaks down to 7,200 questions an hour, 120 questions a minute or 2 questions a second, globally – which isn’t doing to badly, even if we say so ourselves.
The thing is, everyone can always do better and we’re no exception. So this month we’re reaching out to you guys, the contributors to UK & Ireland Answers for your feedback.
The short survey that you can find here or linked to from the UK & Ireland Answers Homepage will let us know what we’re doing well and where we can improve.
We’re all ears here…
– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team
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All I really want is some decent reviews into appeals, instead of getting a generic robot response and having a blank space in the “violation reason” section of the e-mail every time.
hell yeah!
get rid of trolls – ban the ip addy, they just change their name and are back within minutes
stop giving violations for nothing
i got one for asking “where do snails go in the snow?” pathetic!
make questions all english or have an option to set it and keep the setting, i have to mess with it everytime i come on here
more points when you answer, less when you ask, ive been at level 3 for a year at least – and im always on here answering,
should be able to trade our points or something?
oh and easily accessible sub sections would be helpful
I do not want you to presume you have the right to suggest questions for me. You have no idea of my expertise or interests. It really smacks of the ‘big brother’s watching you’ syndrome.
Overall, I think the picture over the last year has been one of improvement. The violation situation has improved with the new reporting system, even though there is still a long way to go here before we get to the point where we have a system which actually operates effectively as intended: we’re still finding content in accordance with the guidelines being unjustly eliminated, an appeals system which generally does not appear to be fair and effective, and abusive content which does not get removed because the system for evaluating “reliable users” does not appear to be as effective as it should be. I feel strongly that appeals should be reviewed by the appellant’s peers, the users themselves, with the system being managed and supervised by the staff to ensure that the guidelines are being implemented. That is the biggest improvement you could deliver.
stop removing questions, stupid violations and return the old-style avatars
Two suggestions – on Advanced Search, could you also add “Within 24 Hours” so it’s possible just to search for the latest posts on a topic, or at least have the option to sort by date posted or most recent response. Sometimes when I look at “Last 7 days” there are over 400 hits that I have to scroll through to find new information. Also it would be great if you could select more than 1 board at a time.
For one stop doing stupid updates cos i don’t notice the changes it makes it difficult to answer questions!!!
1) the ‘do a little dance’ suggestion wears a little thin after a few hundred best answers. Could this email be made optional please?
2) the search window takes ages to appear because of those category lists (which I have never, ever used) and it insists on forgetting that I only want questions from the last seven days. The search phrase seems to get corrupted if it contains lots of keywords too.
3) why such a low character limit on email lengths? Having to break a reply to a request for more info into multiple emails or edit it for size is ridiculous.
I do enjoy answers most of the time,but, lately i have been inundated with adverts that break in,some with sound,and they are most distracting. I know you have to finance the service,but this is becoming a real intrusion, my lower task bar becomes full and i have to stop every thing to deleat them. I would appreciate you giving it some thought.
1) Stop handing out violations for no reason.
2) If a person gets banned, let them keep their email. (Keeping in mind they could have been banned for no reason)
3) Make it more obvious which category users are posting questions in, before they post the question. (So we don’t get questions about cats in LGBT or something). It gets really annoying after a while.
I’d like to see the end of the Thumbs up/down, in it’s present form. It’s frankly infuriating to write an answer, based on personal fact, and see a TD from some anonymous person, who has no possible means of knowing me, or the facts I am writing about.
To be or not to be….that is the question. How can we improve Answers when it deterioates.
The ability to reply directly to other answers on a question would be good, so the answerer receives an email notifying them of a reply to their comment.
That would make things more open to debate and make YA a lot more interesting.
As I put at the end of the questionnaire:
Your understanding of English seems basic; the recently introduced spellchecker doesn’t recognise numerous proper words. The section on the blog leading to this survey even had a grammatical error – use of ‘to’ where ‘too’ should be – which indicates a lack of concern.
The site appears to run almost automatically, with violations sent out without any obvious human inspection and the recent ‘suggested questions’, while semi-useful, is obviously a basic software which uses just a simple key-word to recommend questions.
The survey I have just filled in is amateur, with questions having ambiguous answers, and you will gain nothing of use from this. In fact it almost appears as if you are forcing users to give answers that will lead to results you would like to see. I suggest attempting to create a survey more open to how your users actually feel, rather than offering answer choices that leave the user selecting an answer due to it being the closest to their opinion, yet still ‘miles’ off.
The ‘questions suggested for you’ thing is still very inaccurate. For instance, I’ve contributed to a couple of English to Spanish (or vice-versa) translations, and just because of that I get all sorts of ‘please translate this from Hebrew to Korean’ or ‘how do I say … in Italian?’… things I’ve got no clue about.
And, I think it’s unfair to let people vote for their own answers as best, you could either block that option (just like one can’t rate one’s own answers, which is perfectly fine) or require 2+ votes to be chosen ‘best answer’.
Give users constant feedback on the reporting quality of their violations notices, so that they can improve it. Eg, a % successful would be good.
Fast banning of violators.
Heighten YA rules, about offensiveness, especially in known black spots, such as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender question areas, where users post highly offensive posts against gays etc.
Add better information upon uses, not just all time % best answers, but past year % best answers etc. This is encouraging, as users probably improve the quality of their answers over time.
But YA is a great service, it’s just making great, even better!
There seems to be a large number of American users who log into UK Yahoo Answers by mistake. Their answers to questions in the Education and Higher Education sections are useless, due to the education system being totally different.
The other failing is how most ‘Top Contributors’ cheat their way to such positions in the leader board. They this by answering question at the last minute before they close, and downgrade or copy the best answer, then vote for it themselves.
Make it so no one can set there answers to “private” until they reach level 2 this will get rid off the spammers that paste the same inapropriate link when answering questions,people than can see all their answers report multiple spam .
We need people with local knowledge of swear words and abbreviations,there are users on the Scottish football section using sectarian words that Yahoo dont know what they mean,get local people involved in the monitoring of the sites,this would cut down on violations of innocent questions/answers and would help deciding who should get violated.
In the advanced search option the minimum time I can search for historical questions is seven days. That means if on Monday I look for questions about a particular subject then I minimally get the last seven days worth – and if I make the same search again the following day, I still get the last seven days worth and have to make my way through six days worth of questions I already went through on Monday.
A one and three day search option would resolve that.
I’m witht the comment below. Justice for false reporters. I get violations warnings for no good reason. Not on..I don’t have time to appeal.
Go knock on Google’s door or Microsoft’s and say “We made a mistake. We’re sooooooo sorry, guys! We want to sell up.”
A list of Mathematical symbols need to be added (for both people asking a question and answering it) becuase it would make explaining things so much easier and much clearer to read.
(e.g. squared, the summation symbol…).
Some of the answers I have got for my questions. I think it is unfair to some people who have answered them and not got the points they deserve. For example a spammer or person who contributes nothing to my question will still leave with the same amount of points (2) as everyone else. Even those who tried their best and came up with a pretty solid answer. For this reason I think it would be a good idea to have a 1st, 2nd & 3rd best answer (whereby a 1st gets 10, 2nd gets 6 and 3rd gets 4 points).
Seperate the UK answers from the US answers for God’s sake!!
Can you try and sort out this ‘Yahoo! Answers is currently unavailable…’
lt keeps happening every one minute, and keeps on doing it now.
The administering of violations seems to have no logic. If a trouble-making troll reports something, is that any reason to delete the question? I have friends who sneak their question in again (under the troll’s radar) and no violation is found by you guys..so, that proves there was no violation in the first place.
Watch out! Watch out! There’s a troll about.
I never use Thumbs up and Thumbs down….can’t see the point…it just engenders ill-feeling since the ‘haters’ on here simply use TD’s to aggravate honest folk. So, get rid of TU’s and TD’s.
I don’t find anything wrong with Y!A atm, I’m very pleased with it… only sometimes once my question has been revolved by itself (incase I haven’t choosen a best answer in time) or something like that, I can’t delete it… the only change I would make is being able to delete a question even once it’s resolved.
All-in-all, I really enjoy Yahoo Answers. However, there are a few points that annoy me, some of which have already been mentioned.
Please, for the love of God, stop Americans posting in the UK section and vica versa. Normally this wouldn’t be too bad, if when Americans wander over they post insulting responses to questions which are blatently aimed at Brits, purely because they just don’t realise. I mean, seriously guys, it’s Yahoo. If you can’t redirect people to the correct area via IP, then no-one can.
The reporting system is horrendous. Sometimes I report blatently offensive posts or answers, or answers which are spam, and they never get removed, or it takes a long time before they are removed. Then, if I post a response which some people don’t like but doesn’t disobey any guidelines, it gets removed straight away! I really don’t understand it.
Also, you seem to remove any questions regarding Israel almost instantly. Why? Are we not allowed to discuss the nation of Israel?
Also, thumbs up and thumbs down should be removed. Sometimes I post very detailed and factual answers, based on research I did especially to answer the question, and it gets thumbed down. Why? Don’t know. Who? Don’t know. But that thumbs down discredits time and effort I put into trying to help someone.
That’s my 2 cents anyway. Hope it helps.
Give all participants voting ability. If someone at level one asks a question and one or more respondents give a responsible,lengthy and professional answer there is no way for such answers to even be acknowkedged. This could be interpreted as rudeness or indifference and result in the respondent refraining from further participation on the site. As the user graduates up the levels their voting power could increase on a pro-rata basis,i.e., level 2 = 2 points and so on.
let us remove our answers accounts, without having to delete our email adress
The main fault in YA is the encouragement given to users to answer too many questions too briefly too quickly and without adequate thought.The points awarding rules need to be revised with a view to rewarding “quality” of answers rather than quantity of answers. .
violations are the bug bear of everyone,so do as you do with questions and answers,limit them, to say just two a day!! easy in”it..
Could you please make it obligatory to have a contributor run a spellcheck before a question or answer is submitted as some of the items are incomprehensible.
Definately have option for UK Only or USA Only, (or in fact any country only), I am fed up getting responses from USA members when I have clearly specified I want UK users to respond due to the nature of what I am asking.
Another thing, please have a method to ask a question in response to a response given by someone who doesn’t want contacting, but allow it for specifically relating to the main YA question. I have had people respond to a question, but there’s no way to question them about their answer, so they respond to my YA question; but their answer doesn’t actually ‘answer’ my question if that makes sense, so I feel the need to ask them another question to clarify what they meant.
If you understood that, then you deserve a medal, I only just managed to understand it myself! LOL
Some very heartfelt and serious comment already. Trolls are a blight (see questions on global warming); I have had a perfectly correct answer removed – I appealed with no result (it does make me question the vailidity of the process). The spell checker could be improved – English English has differences to American English and it has not been taught some obvious and much used technical words in some of the specialist sections.. Some questions are extremely repetitive – could you find a way of directing people towards recent questions?
I have had a yahoo account for around 6 years but only came across answers around a year ago.
Last November I tried to log in but could not. The reason, it seems, was due to a ‘violation of the rules’. Being 100% positive I had never posted or answered in this way I appealed. Over 30 emails were sent to the various Yahoo addresses I could find. 30 identical template replies were sent.
Yahoo would not investigate, explain the reason for the ban or even look into my case.
I was not in the least bothered about Y!A BUT I was bothered about the fact I could not access the 200+ photographs on my flickr account and more importantly access and email my online leukaemia support Yahoo group. My son died of this disease and I belong to a group of 15 or so parents who lost children at the same time and this group has been my lifeline.
So, improvements: Rather than the lazy, automated reply to appeals or the ‘I can’t be bothered to look into this’ approach ‘The Team’ should take time to check appeals properly, especially if the ‘user’ involved has taken the time to write a polite enquiry.
I understand that there are a lot of ‘trolls’ and this may be time consuming but surely that is part of ‘The Team’ job?
Meanwhile, I am still unable to send emails/receive to my group from my main email as the ban remains.
Cheating:
On at least 5 occasions I have had my answer copied and pasted.
A user with answer the question quickly so theirs is one of the first,
They will then wait a while, check back, copy and paste a well-written, accurate answer and edit their own.
This practice makes it look like THEY were plagiarised as their answer appears first!
On all of these occasions MY answer was awarded ‘Best Answer’ but to someone else!
If edits could be set as ‘additional details’ (with the original reply still visible) plus time stamps added it would be clear to the askers who did the research/had the knowledge and this practice would stop.
Thumbs System
This is crazy as stalkers will thumb people down for no reason or do it as the ‘opinion’ differs from their own!
It would be better to have a ‘points’ system where an answer can be rated, for example, between 0-3.
If you like the answer give it a 3, if not, give it 0.
This way the better answers will score high and the poorer ones low or not at all.
Only tha accumulative score would show.
Can you ban the Religious Q Its serves no purpose other than to deliberately antagonise people,it appears to be used by only a small section who submit a huge amount of Q mostly nonsense…
Can you please separate the US and other English speaking answers from the English ones as it causes no end of confusion when no one knows very often where the questioner or answerer is from.
If you can separate French (for example) and English, then it should not be difficult to separate US and English.
Hi Y!AT
It is nice to know you are listening, because there’s always room for improvement. And this latest update about restricting links for Level 1 users that was a surprise, well done YAT! And I think the majority of users are happy about it, it just takes some adjusting I guess.
And since this is a survey blog (the survey I did do btw)…What about the scoring system maybe that could be improved. Maybe unlimited votes at a certain level and reducing the thumbs ratings in some way.
Just a few thoughts YAT
Thank you
I do not mind suggested questions but can Yahoo update these when resolved or, more importantly, deleted. I often click a suggested question onlt to find it has been deleted. Also can we be told if a question or answer we have reported is removed? I like the idea of a points system for 1st 2nd and 3rd best answers, sometimes I find it hard to choose.
It needs an insert symbol facility as well as sub and superscript. This would make it a lot easier to give good explanations in the science and mathematics section.
I dislike political correctness. You allow offensive comments cosisting of bad language yet you would not allow your idea of basic descriptions because of offending some minority. I am fed up of hearing about them. I have friends of all nationalities and a beautiful very black American daughter in law who does not give a damn about names and stupid offended minorities. I have a Jolley Nigger Sambo Money Box
and my D-o-L wants it for her collection. You won’t allow such words. Grow up yourselves at yahoo!
Sub comment: I am amazed that you have displayed my comments; I wonder if they will stick.
Vertically challenged Limey
Completely agree with jayson and others, your violation notices suck big time and I will thank you in advance for terminating my account as you are more than likely to do exactly that once I have submitted this.
Allow/encourage question askers to add comments later, to provide feedback on the quality of the answer chosen as ‘Best’.
Whilst immediate selection of ‘best’ can be fairly simple, there are times when some advice needs to stand the test of time, and thus longer-term additions would be useful from the questioner.
Keep thumbs up and down, it is useful, though sadly intelligent and correct answers do get thumbed down.
why does this thing delete your typing if you don’t enter you information properly.
this is crap get is sdorted i just spent 20 minutes typing a lot of good advice and now you won’t read it because you wiped it out. morons!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Get rid of recommended questions, they are creepy, stop killing the site for updates every three days, and get rid of trolls.
Get rid of those spammers who post pointless links everywhere… especially whoever posts links to cheap sport gear in the health forum.
And please stop going down! When I need to ask a question, it always seems to be down just lately.
To improve you would have to actually want to..And based upon recent showings I feel there is less than any enthusiasm to do so..
When you say we are doing repairs, do them.
Stop the thumbs up/ down option..It just gets abused by the moronic with nothing else to do.
Re grade the points system, better yet do away with points and just let it be for fun ..
please seperate the English from USA|
Yes you can do better!!!
Look at 360 plus for Vietnam. then look at the new profiles USA and UK. You have done much better on the 360 plus. Why can’t you that for us???
Also. I have a major bone of contention with my e-mail. I am receiving NONE of the ones regarding new Qs and starred Qs from my contacts which again you have done better in the past.
Come on Yahoo, you have proved to me and yourselves that you can do better so do i!!!
I want yahoo to be more famous. Like as famous as YouTube. I want more views.
I am new to this site under 24 hrs new.Already finding it frustrating as i came on this morning and found new questions answered by Americans,another country has different time zones.Please let the uk Ireland site be just for the people of the two countries.Every site seems to be dominated by Americans.I like Americans nothing against them,but UK / Ireland should be just that.
Please separate the UK and US sites so users can get answers that reflect their own culture, education or legal system. I am fed up of Bible belt ranting, accusing under 18s of statutory rape and shouts of “baby murderer ” to frightened young pregnant girls.
Also getting English spelling corrected by Americans on the UK site is really annoying. I am sure this must be just as irritating to US users when we stray into their area and submit our weird European notions and
difficult spellings!
FIX THE THUMBS UP/DOWN FEATURE…its really confusing when they magically appear and then go away again.
Feature more interesting questions that the community finds interesting rather than really specalist questions that has no relavance to most people.
Loosen up your definition of “chatty” behaviour and focus instead on spam and insulting answers and questions.
Update the top answerers questions more frequently and accuratley!
You could take points from users who always never pick a best answer for the questions they’ve asked.
Also, I think there needs to be better personal communication from the Y!A answers team if you need to contact them ie when appealing against a violation you should actually have a chance of being succesful in your appeal if you really didnt do anything wrong.
I think a great idea would be that you can comment on other people’s answers.
For example if you go to answer a question and see that someone has answered it wrongly, you could comment it and say “this is incorrect” instead of having to answer the question and say “John8364 is wrong by the way!”
And vice versa if someone has definitely answered it correctly.
I think this would really move Yahoo! Answers on and make it more fun to use.
Thanks
Hello Yahoo!,
I have to say I am very disappointed with the amount of technical issues and how often they occur. It seems to be happening all the time.
These are issues that you are aware of, and you have put up notices saying you are doing something about it. Are you? Because I kind of find that difficult to believe. Nothing seems to be improving the situation, the site keeps on crashing.
Apart from that, there is another issue in which concerns me. The Question Deletion Appeal, needs to be returned and it needs to be fairer. The system you currently have in place is quite unfair and unjustly. I expect you to investigate or review questions that have been wrong deleted. I don’t appreciate it when I receive auto-response messages telling me of the Community Guidelines in which I am already aware of. I have had questions and answers deleted wrongfully and you are just not listening to me. Return the Appeals.
Thirdly, the new Yahoo profiles are a bit bland, I would like if they had themes and colour schemes. Other than that, its an improvement from 360.
Two categories I would like added:
“Atheists & Agnostics”
“Twitter”
Overall its a great website, just make the necessary improvements and it will stay great and more.
Please make the default search setting work; mine is set to find Open Questions but I still get directed to Resolved questions up to 2 yrs old.
my cousin is to young and she can’t be part of yahoo answers and maybe you can make a kids website like this more safer like stardoll but i hope you make it better cause stardoll is to girlish and i don’t like it all you do is buy clothes and if you want to buy nice stuff you have to pay with your own real money how shupid!!!!!!
if we are not allowed to ask questions that have adult content in them then have an adult section (i.e family and realationships section)
make more sections its sometimes hard to pick a section that suits your answer
i also think you delete questions to easily
also i think that the uk and American y!a should be joined unless there is a question specific to america or the uk and then they can have a section for that
i agree about the violations thing aswell
i think the rating the questions is fair though the person who asks the question should be aloud to pick the best answer
i dont think its fair the way some people answer questions with something like ‘sjdhfhdd’ just to get the points i think that you should be aloud to delete that question (and they should lose some points lets say 10) for doing that
thanks, jane
please remove abuse and deleating our question.If people find it offensive then better not to answer to the question. we have the right to ask and put our views. sure this is what yahoo wants. to understand each other and bring us all together. but by deleating u are giving right to hypocrites.
secondly our answer should go to submit straight.
There doesnt seem to be box,to ASK a question !
1) Have an effective appeals procedure
2) You shouldn’t be able to vote for yourself
3) Allow freedom of speech / reduce political correctness
4) Keep UK and USA apart
5) Only users who answered the question can rate TU/TD. You should be able to see how people rated
You should put some kind of moderation on the questions, I only use this website for answers when I can’t find what I’m looking for in a search engine and it pisses me off that people ask stupid, easilly searchable questions because they are too lazy/stupid to read about a subject and can only compute tiny bite sized chunks of information.
I agree with others when they say about the violation notices, these seem to be given out for absolutely silly reasons, and on the other hand some people who consistently use abusive language etc don’t get their answers/questions removed, I also don’t want you to suggest questions for me I can make my own choices thanks, and on the ‘my profile’ page I keep getting ‘CONNECTION SUGGESTIONS’ from you and I don’t know these people from Adam although it says that these are people I have contacted?? and one more thing, the word bitch should be perfectly acceptable on the dogs section of Q & A.
Please, for the love of God, stop Americans posting in the UK section about things which they know little or nothing about. Normally this wouldn’t be too bad, if when Americans wander over they post insulting responses to questions which are blatently aimed at Brits, purely because they just don’t realise. I mean, seriously guys, it’s Yahoo. If you can’t redirect people to the correct area via IP, then no-one can.
The reporting system is horrendous. Sometimes I report blatently offensive posts or answers, or answers which are spam, and they never get removed, or it takes a long time before they are removed. Then, if I post a response which some people don’t like but doesn’t disobey any guidelines, it gets removed straight away! I really don’t understand it.
Also, you seem to remove any questions regarding Israel almost instantly. Why? Are we not allowed to discuss the nation of Israel?
Contributors who give thumbs down indiscriminately might be deterred if their screen name has to be added (as it does when starring a question).
Dear YA!
Please can you bring back the notice reminder emails to “CHOOSE A BEST ANSWER” before a post expires & many many posts go into public voting as we forget the expiry date & do not choose a best answer.
Thank you
Since people don’t seem to like the thumbs up and down much. How about instead of the thumbs up and down being anonymous you get to view a list of people who thumbs down the answer and thumbs up the answer. (like when you star a question).
On your profile page people can look though the questions you’ve rated (and see for themselves if your rating is worth taking seriously) and see the % thumbs up and % thumbs down of the answers you’ve rated.
I think it’s good that you have to be level 2 to thumbs up or down answers. There should be similar awards for getting to level 3,4,5…
How about as a award for achieving level 3 you can add a multiple choice question for surveys so answerers have no choice but to choose an answer from the list instead of being able to put pointless answers. These type of questions wouldn’t need a thumbs up or down rating system.
I’m sure other people on here can come up with some more ideas.
I do agree with people who say they should separate the UK answers from the US answers. At least give people the choice of posting their question in UK or US or whether they want it to appear in both.
I think that there should be an additional details for answers like there is for the questions which shows the time the additional information has been added. So people that answer first can’t edit their own answer by copying other peoples answer who have answered after making it seem like they answered correctly first.
The question deleting system seems completely random.
And, why bother with an appeal system if all you are going to do, is send a standard email saying you can’t discuss indivdual cases.
At best it’s an insult to the YA users intelligence and at worse, dishonest.
Also US and UK users should be flagged in some way. It causes confusion and sometimes irritation when answerers don’t realise which site they are on.
Stop putting up adverts that take 100% processor time to run (such as the recent one for a sunscreen). Over the past couple of days, If I have more than one question open at a time my computer becomes almost unusable!
I don’t think US and UK should be seperated, but optional location information could be included next to the question (most people understand that there are cultural/legal/social differences between the two countries).
I’ve often lost the chance to select a best answer, as I don’t come on YA every day (some of us have to work some of the time!). An email reminder would be useful (as someone else has suggested). Alternatively, leave the ‘choose best answer’ option open even when public voting is underway.
Also, improve reporting of ‘open’ answers – often when I sort by date or number of answers, the answer has been deleted, is closed, or has been answered even though it says “0 answers”. It wastes too much time when looking for questions that need answering.
Perhaps you could also stop people asking more questions when they have lots of questions for which they haven’t chosen a best answer – it is annoying when people ask a question but never choose a best answer.
You should be able to split points across answers – the full answer may not be given by only one person (some questions are complex).
You should be able to search for tie-break questions, in the hope this resolves a lot of the tie-breaks out there. Alternatively, my earlier suggestion of continuing to allow the asker to choose a best answer once it goes to the public vote may help with this too.
Use spell cehck facility on commnets too!
A comprehensive British spellchecker!
No violations or thumbs down – If somene doesn’t like my opinion,or I theirs,so be it,that’s what freedom of speech is about.
Age groups – 18 + Any topic is OK.
Cardiff,Wales is in South Glamorgan NOT Cardiff County!
Do something to protect your members from abuse!!
We’ve all had violation notices, often for good reason, but many users seem to get these violation notices without reason and without any way of appealing. Then when there’s real abuse within the community the abuse team don’t seem to do anything about it, twice now I’ve had members following me throughout the community, blatantly abusing me – despite reporting the abuse I’ve yet to see the abuse team do anything about it!
…and on the line of abuse, you should also be able to delete questions, I’ve never understood why you’re unable to do this to begin with, it’s your account and your questions after all. When someone launches a personal attack against you they can then use your past questions to find out information about you, this happens even if you hide your questions and answers from those who are not in your contacts (and wipe your contacts to make sure). I’ve also noticed some of my questions turn up on internet searches on other Yahoo! services, again leaving members of this community open to abuse – it is part of Yahoo!’s privacy policy to share with other Yahoo! services, which is hardly that good at protecting our privacy (!!), but this is exactly why a delete option should be available on our own questions!
PLEASE stop members claiming they are doctors or nurses, people can lie using their claims to gain weight to get their answers chosen as best, sure if you have worked as a doctor or nurse you may be giving correct information but even doctors can be wrong, behind in research, or just plain wilfully ignorant! Many people, not just the young members who are at most risk, will believe the answers of those claiming to be doctors or nurses over others, I’ve seen two pretty high-ranking members who claim to be a doctor and nurse give some information in their answers that is not just incorrect but also potentially DANGEROUS, and people believe them because of their claims. People should have sense not to believe everything they read online, I’m sure Yahoo has a disclaimer somewhere, but if this site is interested in keeping it’s users safe it would stop people making these claims. REAL sources, not titles without proof.
Why was i awarded 10 points for best answer on the burka question only to have question deleted? is yahoo bowing down like the gonernment when it comes to this bloody religion? As 10 people agreed to my answer as well it seems that the general audience agreed with me. I suppose some Islam b…… complained. Truth hurts love don’t it!
Also get your spell checker fixed. The alternative word is atrocious. no wonder people submit answers with appalling spelling.
Hey everyone,
Thank you so much for your feedback, however strong. It’s important we hear from you. Thanks also to each of you who filled in the CSAT survey.
There are almost too many points to reply to all of them here but we’re happy to address a few.
We know the issue of violations is frustrating. We’re looking into how we can do better here but would also urge people to appeal their violations if they feel they’re unfair. This is very important.
With regards to US/UK content the way the UK site is set up that on the questions are all UK but US users also see them on the US site and can answer them. We hear you that this is currently unpopular.
Heather: with regards to your account, as you know we’ve looked into this and things are well on to their way to being amended. We’re happy to be able to help.
If you guys have any more issues you want to discuss with us, outside of violation notices or appeals, which need to go through the Yahoo! Customer Care team, please email us on y_answrs_team_uk@yahoo.co.uk
thanks!
– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team
add some more categories?
like a metal one, that’d be awesome.
i hope they’re going to get rig of the trolls…lol
x
And we need to stop getting violation notices for no reason. Some of our fans report our questions and answers even if it doesn’t violate the community guidlines.
Yes…your improvement indeed is something to write home about – usually with a degree of confusion.
I’ve witnessed the pettiness concerning the war (aka ‘conflict’) between the western world and Afghanistan. If a questioner is brave enough to state BOTH sides of the story, or mentions the 21st century insecurity of Britons in power…and criticizes Y!A UK & Ireland questioners/answerers for being somewhat insular about their current power in the world, the question/answer doesn’t stay on for long. (read July 6th, 2009 at 10:38 am by Thelma…that comes as near as dammit to me particular bearbug)
Realise it’s nowt to do with the top dogs at Y!A as a whole…but a group of trolls who realise there is some poor bastard who they will gang up on, with their multi-names and have equally poor Y!A running to their every need.
I had a question erased a couple of weeks ago;
‘Their families have been informed…’; do newsreaders have to end stories of dead allied soldiers like so?
…methinks I had actually awarded a dear the 10 points for the best answer, but suspect a punter, going by the name of ‘domme me’ either got his pals to gang up and get question erased, or used half a dozen of his troll-y names to do the same…but yet, answered (and got awarded the 10 points on both) two equally testing questions of the – er…’conflict in Afghanistan.’ Either you didn’t see me coming – or felt guilty for allowing trolls run your front-line business and let my answers run.
h.r.barbarie
Hey h.r.barbarie,
Thanks for your comment – please check your emails about this.
Thanks!
– Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team