Changing time to choose a Best Answer

Based on your feedback to be able to resolve a question quicker, we have now reduced the wait time to choose a best answer from 4 hours to 1 hour.  If you now receive multiple responses within an hour you can select one of those as your Best Answer, or choose to put the question to vote at this earlier stage.

The full lifecycle of a question won’t change – questions will still be open for 4 days and up to maximum of 8 days if you extend the expiration.  This change gives you the option to resolve earlier or put to vote earlier.   If you take no action to resolve or extend the question, the question will automatically go to vote for the Best Answer.

Optional Preview screen when answering questions

Many of you have commented that to you’d prefer an answering experience without having to see your response on the Preview page first.  We are now able to offer this…

If you are signed-in with your Answers account and have answered at least one question before then when submitting your answer you can choose to Submit your response immediately without going to the Preview page first.  We’ve kept the Preview page too, so you can still see how your response will look before publishing it.

What makes Yahoo! Answers unique is the avid involvement of the community it is YOU that provides the content so continue to ask, answer and vote!

Ok, the title of the post is not just for me but I hope for all of us in Yahoo! Answers.  Did you know that on average, 10% of questions are in tie-breaker status at any given time on Answers? And, at any given moment, there are literally millions of questions open on Answers?

For many members, it’s easy to get swept up in the “Ask” and “Answer” flow as you watch the steady stream of answers that come in when you ask a great question. But then the tough part comes: picking a Best Answer! How do you choose?

If you’re looking for a few tips on how to pick your next Best Answer, here are a few taken straight from our community:

• “To put it simply, I go with the one that is the most useful or the least useless. I do notice the number of thumbs-ups and downs the answer gets, and I use that and the level/BA percentage of an answerer to determine whether or not I should trust the answerer, but the main deciding factor is what I think of the answer itself. A concise but comprehensive explanation beats a long drawn-out half off topic lecture.” – Luigi
• However, “According to the specification of the question I read carefully and I compare it to the other questions, I make sure their answers make sense and have more clear explanations. Not always the thumbs up are right and this person can be wrong, So I read & understand before I give my best answer…8)” – “Evo_Raptor”
• “[…] If there are two equally good answers, I choose the one with better grammar, punctuation, and spelling.” – *Sombra*
• “I pick Best Answer by re-reading through all the answers again from my question. Then pick the one that was the most helpful, informative, and the answerer was polite while giving me the information I needed.” – Future Pet Vet
• “Whoever has clearly spent the most time answering the question and not just put silly 1 word answers or sarcastic comments. Also, if i believe the answer is 100% true.” – Craig and Charlie

Even with tips like these, picking a best answer can be tough—and for many Answers community members, it becomes so tough, questions go unresolved and end up in tie-breaker status.

But for those of you who enjoy helping the undecided pick a Best Answer, be sure to check out the Answers TieBusters group—a group dedicated to clearing the backlog of undecided questions found on Answers: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Yah00AnswersTieBusters/

All in all, remember: If you asked a question, choose a Best Answer! Otherwise your question may end up getting a best answer from a troll and you may never give someone from the community the joy of earning a Best Answer!

Photo by Noël Zia Lee

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 Philippines Terms of Service will be seen in the Philippines Leaderboards.

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