Yahoo! Philippines Answers blog

Back in October we announced that with your help, Yahoo! Answers hit the 1 billion question and answers mark.  At this point, we also reached an astounding 179 million users around the world!

Just when we thought our community couldn’t grow any faster, a mere two months later, we’ve tackled the 200 million-worldwide visitor mark!

When you break it down, on average, that’s:

• 350,000 new  visitors a day
• 243 new visitors a minute

So here’s a big thanks to you, the Answers community for spreading the word about Answers, and sharing with your friends, family, and anyone you meet on the internet about what you’ve learned (and what you want to learn!) on Answers

At this rate, we’ll hit 300 million in no time!

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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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It happens sometimes. You post a question and get no answer or you just can’t find that “best answer”.  Here’s a quick reminder of how you can save points while getting the best out of your questions:

• Once your question is open for business, you can always add details. Just hover your mouse over the ‘edit’ section under your question to add details.
• Instead of asking the same question again, why not to give the community more time to answer? You have the option to extend the expiration of your question by three days- plenty of time to increase your chance at getting the answer you are looking for. Since your question is initially  given four days to be resolved, extending it means seven days to get an answer. At the end of the seven days, you will either have to pick a best answer or put your question up for voting. You will not be able to extend it any further.

• If your question does not get an answer, it will disappear. If this happens, you will recover the 5 points, and you can post it again. However, think before asking again: did you give enough details? Was the question written clearly? Try to give as many hints as possible to your potential answerers!
• And finally, a tip for a super question: pick the best answer. It’s a great way to reward that person who took some time to give you a brilliant answer to your question… Who doesn’t love a bit of an ego boost from time to time.

I hope you find this helpful.  Now go out there and ask questions!

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Hi everyone, we have some planned maintenance scheduled on 12noon on Saturday, September 19.  During this time Answers will be unavailable.

Don’t worry though, there are heaps of other things to do on Yahoo! to fill your time!

• Check out the newly launched Yahoo! Asia Games website.
• Get up to date with what’s happening in the country through Yahoo! Philippines.
• Discover Yahoo!’s latest product for Pinoys called Meme.  It’s currently by invitation only righ now but if you leave a comment here, I can send you an invite so you can check it out yourself.

We appreciate your patience while we complete this vital maintenance, many thanks!

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Over the last few days, we’ve been rolling out a new design to the category pages that should help you find the questions you care about more quickly.  Starting today, these changes will be a permanent feature in your Answers experience.

Here are some of the changes that we have made:

• Easier Category Navigation: We’ve moved the list of categories and subcategories to the top of the page instead of listing down the left-hand side. This should make it easier for you to move to a different category without needing to scroll down the page.
• More Space on the Page: Just like we did with the question page last year, we wanted to offer you more space in the category page by moving to a wider page design which is optimized for a higher screen resolution.
• More Prominent Leaderboard: Who doesn’t want to be famous?  The right-hand side of the page now lists the top 10 answerers for the category or subcategory you are browsing.  We wanted to give more prominence not only to the category leader, but to rest of the top contributing answerers as well.  We also heard from you guys that when a category was being sponsored you still wanted to be able to see how you were doing in that category’s Leaderboards. The new category design allows this.
• More Prominent Question List:  You visit the category page to look for questions to answer, right?  We’ve made the question list wider and more visible to help youyou’re your answers in there faster.
• Sort by “Most Popular” Questions – We’ve added a “most popular” sort filter on the sidebar so you can see what the community is most interested in with just one click.
• Sticky Question Tabs – Open, resolved, and in voting tabs are now “sticky,” meaning that as you move between categories, your tab choice will persist for the session even as you vote for questions in different categories.

We’re always looking for ways to make it easier for you to use and participate in Answers, and we hope these changes continue to help you find the questions that may be most interesting to you.

As always (but especially when we change stuff on Answers) we would love to know what you think. So why don’t you check out the new category page and leave us a comment with your feedback?  Thanks everyone!

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I believe it’s not a secret that one of the most addicting and engaging reasons people come back to Yahoo! Answers is because it’s a great platform to share your experiences and knowledge by answering other people’s questions.  Everyone benefits from people who post really good answers and to get more people to do this, we’re sharing to you the five golden rules about answering questions.  Here are THE rules to ensure quality-answers which will certainly contribute to making Answers a relevant place to ask questions:

1. Remember that you are answering to help the asker: Don’t answer just for the sake of getting points or to advertise your own questions to the community.  If you don’t know the answer, skip to a question you may be more knowledgeable about.  And remember, we now have suggested questions for active users.  These are questions that will automatically appear on your homepage.

2. Be polite and respectful: No one likes to be ridiculed and insulted.  If you don’t agree with the question, offer your point of view in a constructive and respectful way.  Answers IS a diverse community where everyone is entitled to their own opinion. If YOU FEEL THAT a question or answer violates the community guidelines, report it.

3. Use correct spelling: Avoid text lingo and grammatical errors.  An answer filled with spelling mistakes and typos is confusing and doesn’t improve the Answers quality.  The more understandable your answer is, the higher the opportunities it has to be chosen as best answer or make an impression on someone else.

4. Be relevant: Don’t digress or change the subject when answering a question.  Give a concise answer that sticks to the point.

5. Link to existing sources that have the answer to the question: If you know an excellent website or book that might help, mention it – as long as it’s not spam of course.  Also cite your sources, they are always helpful if anyone wants more information.

If you want to know more about it, don’t hesitate to visit our community guidelines and our help pages.  Feel free also to share with the community some good questions or answers that you found on the site in your comments to this post.

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Recently we’d had feedback that a few glitches on the site have been impacting on the overall experience for many of you, which we apologize for.

So, like an automobile that occasionally needs to be sent to the mechanics for some re-tuning,  we had to send Answers into the garage for a little bit of maintenance.

We’ve now taken it off the blocks and here are the fixes you will see since this latest release:

• Many of you were not regularly receiving immediate email notifications when your network posted a question.  We appreciate how vital it is to get your questions to your Answers network and we have now fixed this to ensure everyone should receive the emails on time.
• One bug that has been a frustration to many of you for a while now is the ability of people you have added to your ‘Blocked users’ list to still be able to post answers to your questions.  This will no longer happen.  Blocked users will no longer be able to answer your questions — we’re sure some of you will be delighted by this!
• When questions are in voting, we’d noticed the total number of votes were not adding up correctly.  After sending the Yamster on a quick mathematics course, we now have the correct totals back on display again.
• A couple of months ago, we introduced inactive hyperlinks for Level 1 users.  To continue to protect everyone using our site against potentially malicious links we’ve made some improvements to this functionality to ensure the right to post hyperlinks really is only earned by trust.
• One piece of feedback we regularly hear is that you want more information on why content has been deleted.  We’ve now refreshed the Violation Notifications that we send to inform you of your content being deleted.  These will now include more details about the actual violation that was committed and hope this will help you better understand why your content was removed from the site.  Remember, all content on the site must be within the community guidelines (hyperlink to CG’s).

Finally, we’ve also laid the groundwork for some more radical changes to certain parts of the site design… so watch this space!

Keep your feedback coming, and we’ll continue to work on keeping the site well oiled!  Thanks everyone!

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Hi everyone,

The Yahoo! Answers Team are excited to announce a small but significant change to the site. As of today, any links posted by Level 1 Answers users will not be hyperlinked.

It may seem like a trivial change but it is an important step to limit the impact of spam on Answers. The site has had a points and levels system since it’s inception, which aims to promote activity and trust. Only hyperlinking http URLs from users who are Level 2 and above is a new way to reward an protect our core contributors.

The lack of hyperlinking applies to any link that begins http:// – links that are posted that begin www. are already not hyperlinked for all users regardless of level. We appreciate that removing hyperlinking for level 1 users is not a final or a perfect solution. For example long URLs are currently being truncated but we are working on further updates to improve this.

We’ve taken this action in response to clear user feedback, from you the Answers community. And rest assured that this is just one of a number of initiatives we are implementing to limit the impact of spam on Answers. We hope it’s a small step towards making Answers a better place. We’d welcome your feedback this change.

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 Photo by HAEROLD PHOTOGRAPHX

Let’s do this YAPpers!  Many thanks to everyone that left a comment and shared their thoughts regarding the possibility of a meet up of the Pinoy community here in Yahoo! Answers!  Because of your feedback, we’re making this a reality.  Let’s have a Pinoy Answers Community Meet Up next month!  Here are the details:

Who: Yahoo! Philippines Answers Users
What: Yahoo! Philippines Answers Community Meet Up!
When: July 18, 2008, 7:30pm
Where: Makati City (specific place to be announced later)

Anyone who wants to attend, just email me the following:

1. Full name:
2. Yahoo! Answers ID:
3. Mobile number:

You can email me at jonasdelosreyes@ymail.com.  Feel free to leave a comment as well if there’s anything else you want to share to me and the community (like venue suggestion maybe, if you’re willing to assist in organizing this, etc.)

Btw, I think YAPpers as a name for Pinoys in Yahoo! Answers is so cool!  Thanks for informing me about it Japs!  And thanks to all the YAPpers!  Hope to see all of you soon!

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Actually, it’s a question that every Pinoy here in Answers should answer.  Is it time for us to have a community meet up or not?  I’m just starting to meet all of you online but I’m sure it will be more exciting if we have an offline event, a meet up of the Pinoy Community in Yahoo! Answers!

Of course, this question raises a string of related questions.  When do we schedule the meet up?  I’m thinking July, but is it too soon or just right?  How about August?  We can have dinner in a restaurant, which leads to the next important question.  Where can we have our meet up?  I’m thinking in a restaurant in Makati City?  If not maybe Ortigas or Quezon City?  Any particular restaurant you have in mind?  Of course, I also want to have a meet up in Cebu (lived there for three years!), and definitely in Davao (can’t forget my Dabawenyo friends, hehehe), definitely in succeeding meet ups.

So share me your thoughts on this as we organize our first Pinoy Answers Community Meet Up.  I’ll make sure to book the place for the event, ensure there’s food and drinks for everyone, prepare an exciting and un-boring program, and bring lots of Yahoo! giveaways to give away!  Hope to see everyone soon!

UPDATE: There’s a big chance I’ll be in the Philippines this July 17 and 18 (a Thursday and a Friday), maybe we can set the Meet Up on the 18th of July, a Friday evening maybe?

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