Yahoo!7 Answers Australia

Lots of updates! [Deep breath...] here goes:

Self-voting: Back by popular demand! The people spoke, and we listened–we’ve put back the ability to vote for your own answers. The arguments were thorough and far-ranging, from “but you can vote for yourself in political elections” to “sometimes it’s the only way I can resolve a question”. Thanks to everyone for their input.

Improved layout (see Fig. 1): We moved the search box up to the green bar, and the “My Q&A” link to the right side of the bar. This makes it easier to find both elements, and cleans up the clutter. The points widget was moved to the left side, above the category list, and now shows your avatar when you’re logged in!

Stats on My Q&A page (see Fig. 2): It’s now much easier to see how you’re doing, graphically. The new module on your My Q&A  page shows the stats of your questions and answers–the questions tab shows the number and percentage of your open, voting, resolved, and deleted questions, and the answers tab shows the number and percentage of your best answers.

No limit on number of answers: We’ve removed the limit on the number of answers a question can receive (it used to be 100), so everybody gets a chance to answer the really popular questions. Questions with more than 30 answers will have paging to make them easier to browse and read.

Spelling suggestion on search results page: To give you extra help in finding what you’re looking for, we added spelling suggestions on the search results pages. When you type in a misspelled word or phrase, the results page will show the header “Did you mean:”, followed by the suggested spelling. Clicking on the suggested spelling will generate another search based on the correction.

Links to international Yahoo! Answers sites: In the footer of every page, you’ll now see links to the five English-language Answers sites.

“Show me another” bug fixed: Now, when you click on the “Show me another” link after taking an action like rate or vote, you will be shown a different question. Previously, you were shown the same question.

We hope you like the changes!

Yahoo!7 Answers Team

As Answers’ audience has become global, you’ve been asking for versions that have a local voice—your country, your culture. Well, we’ve responded. You might already know that there are ten Yahoo! Answers sites around the world—that means three billion people have Yahoo! Answers for their own countries.

Now, the sites themselves have local voices. Many of the world’s Answers Teams have started their own blogs, and they’d love for you to check them out:

You may have noticed that we now have the ability to choose feature questions  relevant to Australia and, if you’re reading this, you also know that we’ve started our own blog.  Stuart and I were so excited about these two functions as they allow us to point you in the right direction of interesting Australian questions and answers and communicate with you through the blog.

There are currently five sub-categories focusing on Australia:

·         Business & Finance – Taxes – Australia & New Zealand 

·         Dining Out – Australia & New Zealand 

·         Local Businesses – Australia & New Zealand 

·         Sports – Football (Australian) 

·         Travel – Australia & New Zealand 

There are, however, many thousands of questions and answers with Australian relevance scattered amongst the international content – one of the benefits of a product like Answers is its global reach – and we’ve made it easy for you to find!

The response from the ANZAC Day questions  was amazing and we enjoyed reading all your questions and answers so much, not just the Featured Questions. 

Question: How did we find ALL the questions and answers?
Answer: Using the Yahoo!7 Answers search feature. (See above left picture)

Use search terms such as ‘Australia’, ‘Australian’, ‘Sydney’ or ’Queensland’. If you want more precision in your search you can go into the Advanced Search.  (See above right picture).  You might just save yourself 5 points if the question has already been asked!

Alana