Yahoo! Philippines Answers blog

Many of you have voiced concerns about the misuse of the Fans and Contacts feature.

Firstly, we’re aware of how strongly many of you feel about this and we’ve heard and taken on board your feedback: we’re sorry we’ve taken so long to address a problem that may have affected your experience of Answers.

However, as of today, we are now making improvements to how Contacts and Fans work on Answers to ensure that your experience on the site is better.

In addition to Contacts and Fans we’ll make some changes to the voting limits.  First of all… let’s cover Fans and Contacts:

What will my Fans see?

Anyone can become your fan by adding you as a `contact`.  Once someone has added you as a contact:

• Fans will get latest updates when you ask questions in the `From my Network` tab
• Email notification when you ask a question

If you don’t want to allow fans at all – you can set this in your Preferences page.

If you don’t want a certain member to be aware of this information you can block them from the My Network page.

If your Q&A and Answers network are marked as `My Contacts Only` on your `Preferences` page, Fans will not gain access to view your content or your network.

Want to know when someone has become your fan?  You can activate a notification in your profile page to receive an email when someone becomes your fan.

What will my Contacts see?

Contacts are those people you choose to add and you will be sharing your content with them.

Once you add a contact they will:

• See your questions and answers
• Get an update on the homepage in the `From my Network` tab when you ask a question
• Have visibility of your Answers Network

Everyone likes to receive the kudos of having new `Fans` of their content and this change will keep the overall control of `who-sees-what` with you.

Keep watching this space – this will be just the first step in changes we have planned for how Contacts and Fans should work and the benefits they bring as we continue to make this feature work for YOU.

Changes to voting limits

We’ve noticed that many you in the Answers community are very avid voters!

To help you continue to feed this passion we’ve now increased the daily limits for the number of votes you can cast.  The new maximum daily are:

• Level 1: 25 votes per day
• Level 2: 50 votes per day
• Level 3: 75 votes per day
• Level 4: 100 votes per day
• Level 5: 125 votes per day
• Level 6: 150 votes per day
• Level 7: 200 votes per day

So what’s stopping you?  Get voting!

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Yesterday, May 10, I had the opportunity to take part in the country’s first nationwide automated elections.  It feels great to be among the millions of Pinoys who took part in this historic event.

For the first time in our country’s history, we relied on an electronic system that handled the counting of votes and transmission and canvassing of election results.  Technically, the election was not fully automated because paper is still involved.  But compared to before, there’s no more need to write one’s preferred candidates, we just have to shade the oval beside their name (the PCOS basically scans the ballots and counts the votes).

According to the Commission on Elections, about 75 percent of the 50 million Filipinos eligible to vote turned out in various precincts.  It’s great to know that many of us braved the heat (I guess that’s better than a rainy election day), endured the long lines (I had to wait for almost 3 hours, but enjoyed the company of my brother and friends from the neighborhood) and for some (especially the senior citizens), faced their fear of technology in the selection of our leaders.

This is certainly one step forward in making our elections more accurate, more reliable, and certainly much faster.  It still surprises many how quickly votes are getting counted now (according to the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, 60 percent of votes were counted on the first day of elections).

I hope you had a relatively good experience while voting yesterday.  What are your thoughts on the new way of voting?  Are you satisfied with the process for the first automated Philippine elections? Share your thoughts to the community, it’s great to hear different points of views from different people who voted in various areas of the country.

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First of all, this is not an elections-related post, at least not yet.  I definitely encourage everyone to go out and register and make that commitment to vote in the upcoming 2010 elections, and stay tuned for what we have in store to cover the elections for the Pinoy Answers Community.  For now, this blog post about voting is really about voting here in Answers.

Recently, many of you wrote to us about unresolved questions and questions that are in tie-breaker status on the site.  The best way to make sure no question remains undecided, is to resolve it either by picking a best answer, or putting it up for voting.  Here is an overview of how the voting process works

Vote as best answer

When a question is asked, it initially remains open for 4 days, but it can be extended at any time to remain open for a total of 8 days.

• If two or more answers are collected, you can either pick the best answer or let the community vote to choose the best answer. If you take no action to resolve the question, the answers are automatically put to a vote by the community.
• If your question receives only one answer, you can extend the open period for four additional days to allow more time for answers to be posted or you can pick ‘No Best Answer’.  When your question expires with only one answer, the question automatically goes to a vote, with No Best Answer as the second option.  If an answer is chosen as the best, your question becomes resolved. However, if the No Best Answer option is chosen as best, the question is automatically deleted and you get five points credited back to your Answers account.
• If a question doesn’t receive any answers, the question expires and is deleted.

A question becomes a Resolved Question when a Best Answer is chosen.  After a question becomes Resolved it stays in Yahoo! Answers and is available for searching and browsing.  The Best Answer remains open to receive comments and ratings from the community.

How do I put my question up for voting?

If you take no action and the question expires, it automatically goes to a vote.  Or:

1. Wait at least four hours after posting the question.
2. Go to the question within the open period, before it expires.
3. Click Edit in the action bar below the question.
4. Select Ask for a Vote in the edit menu.

How do I find questions up for voting?

1. Go to the category of your choice.
2. Select the In Voting tab.
3. Sort the unresolved questions as you like.

What’s a tiebreaker?

If the vote ends as a tie, your question remains in voting as a tiebreaker.  Once a vote has been cast, the question is checked shortly afterwards to determine if there is a best answer.  There are tons of questions out there waiting to be voted on because they’re in tiebreaker status.  Vote so you can get these questions resolved.

As you can see, voting makes a huge difference (both here in Answers and in the upcoming elections as well, hehehe).  If you choose an area you are expert in, you can easily vote for the best answer.  If you choose a category you don’t know much about, you end up learning a lot by reading the answers.  You can pick the best answer, based on detail, helpful tone and general quality, without having to be an expert in the subject area.

Vote now, it’s just one of the many things we can do to make Answers a better and more relevant community.

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