Last week, we asked you to dress up our Yamster for Halloween and boy, we’ve received some amazing entries. We were wowed by the creativity and effort that went into making our Yamster dressed up for Halloween and we want to thank everybody for their participation.
It is our honor to announce the nominees for this year’s Yamster Halloween Costume Contest. We want you to vote for your favorite entry per category. The last day to vote is next Thursday, 12/11 at 1am GMT.
See some more entries in the slide show below and tell us what you think! In order to see all the fun dressed-up Yamsters, please make sure to join the Answers Halloween 2010 group.
Whether you’re a Yahoo! Answers “veteran” or a newbie, after a short time exploring the site you’ll come to realise one of the basic truths of Answers:
In order to receive good answers, you need to provide good questions.
So what makes a good question?
A good question is articulate, to the point, and contains all the necessary information and/or background that the potential answerers need.
Of course, the definition of “relevant” information varies among the different categories, and some questions require specific details… You’ve probably thought of them when you were composing your question.
But just in case, here are some general guidelines:
If the question deals with automobile maintenance and repairs, include the make, model and year of the car. Same goes for electrical appliances.
If you’re asking for help with the identification of a wild animal or plant, please indicate the corresponding geographical location (country, state or province, etc).
Providing a geographical reference is also vital if you’re asking about legal matters or financial issues, such as taxes.
Computer problems? Don’t forget to mention your Operating System and software version number. If it’s a hardware problem, then make and model are essential.
If you’re looking for help with Physics, Chemistry or Math topics please include the full details of your problem (specific conditions, additional factors, etc.).
Asking for recipes? You can mention which units you use (pounds or kilos? Liters or ounces?), thus you’ll avoid getting indications that are harder to understand.
If you remember these recommendations, they’ll help you to get better answers.
The above is based on my personal experience, but I’m just one user. So what about you? From your experience on Yahoo! Answers what are your top tips for getting great answers to your questions?
Yahoo! Answers is undergoing underwent some essential planned maintenance onWednesday 3rd November at 8am-Midday GMT. Answers will be unavailable during that time is now back! The Suggestion Board was unaffected by this.
If there is any change to the schedule, we will inform you here with updates. We’re sorry for the inconvenience caused – we assure you this work is essential.
If you’re looking for something to do during the downtime, why not…
Once again, it’s time for our annual Answers Halloween Costume Contest. Last year, we had awesome winners and we can’t wait to see what you come up with this year!
Download the Yamster avatar and dress him up for Halloween!
Picnik, which is built directly into Yahoo’s own Flickr, offers a plethora of accessories that you can use to deck out Yamster. You can use something like Microsoft Paint, Photoshop, SumoPaint, or any other paint program on the market to edit or enhance an image.
Submissions must be received by midnight BST on Tuesday, November 2nd. Winner(s) will be posted on the Yahoo! Answers Blog and will receive 200 bonus points on Yahoo! Answers.
Rules:
- Yamsters must be submitted to Flickr by midnight BST on November 2nd
When you are in a supermarket you’d be frustrated if someone put a `place-holder` down at the till and then went to do their shopping before `jumping the queue` as they had a placeholder.
Well, in a similar way we hear one of your frustrations on providing answers to the site is when people `place-hold` a position and use edit to provide a later answer, or to copy an answer from someone else. We feel this is unfair to misuse Answers like this and have now added a timestamp to show that someone has edited their answer. To make it fairer to others who spend time writing their answer in full before posting we will now re-order all edited answers to what is the latest position at time of editing.
Why can’t we just show the edits? We don’t have a logical place where we can show how an answer has changed over time and things like highlighting changes with a different colour are quite difficult to show in a way that someone new to answers will understand. We also don’t want to prevent editing like we do currently on the question details as that will prevent you from fixing things like spelling mistakes.
Now we know it can be frustrating if you just want to make one small spelling correction but this is why you are given the opportunity to preview your answer, as per when you ask a question. If you find you are often editing after you answer, it may be worth using the preview just to have one last check before you submit.
Finally, we are going to monitor this change. If we find it does have a detrimental effect, then we may consider making further changes in the future.
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