Yahoo!7 Answers Australia

Everyone knows how it feels to lose someone. Celebrities experience the same sadness and pain that we do when a loved one dies.

Cindy Crawford lost her younger brother to leukemia, and is helping to fight the disease by working with The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and promoting the Light the Night Walk. While the Light the Night Walk does not currently occur in Australia, great local information can be found at the Cure Cancer Australia Foundation.

Cindy’s question is how we can make curing cancer a global priority. The millions of people dying from the disease or who have relatives with cancer all know that this is a fight we can win. They are all holding on to the hope that one day soon, we will.

If anyone is interested, here is a group dedicated to those looking for information regarding prevention methods and cures for cancer.

Yahoo!7 Answers Team

Have you been receiving a bunch of emails for the same Best Answer? Or, maybe you haven’t been receiving notifications at all? What’s up?

We recently released a bug fix, and although it took care of one issue it seems to have created some problems with the best answer email notifications we usually send out.

We apologize for any inbox flooding this may have caused. We are aware of the problem, and have a team of insecticide-wielding Yamsters working on a fix for this new bug as we speak.

Yahoo!7 Answers Team

Where I sit in the office I am surrounded by a bunch of crazy guys whose idea of fun at 5am is not sleeping, but running around Centennial Park 3 times (that’s about 12km!). They run marathons and triathlons as a way to pass the time! This year when they announced a Yahoo!7 team to run in Sydney’s City to Surf I realised I must have somehow been conditioned by my colleagues and so I signed up.

The preparation got off to a slow start and I was worried I might injure myself, but the few weeks of training paid off and I managed to finish the race. For me, it wasn’t about getting the really fast time, but getting out there and having a go – the Australian way. And to top it off, the weather was gorgeous and I was reminded how beautiful Sydney really is… along with more than 63,000 others!

Check out some of the Q&A on  marathons, triathlons, and fun runs or ask your own question!

Have you ever competed in a fun run, marathon or triathlon? Let us know which race and share your experience of training and competing (or perhaps watching as a spectator!).

Alana

When I read a blog post that India’s President quoted a question from Yahoo! Answers in the National Independence Day address, it made me wonder what kind of people rely on Answers every day. There are so many different categories that there is a place for people from all walks of life where they can benefit from answers by other users and offer advice to other askers.

While most people frequent a category or two where their expertise lies, sometimes it is worth category surfing outside the comforts of your usuals. On the weekend I decided to look outside my comfort zone of Travel, and found myself getting lost in categories like:

• History
• Australian Football
• Physics
• Reptiles
• Networking
• Science & Mathematics

So now, when someone engages me with small talk about the weather, no doubt I will surprise them with some very interesting facts!

While our Prime Minister hasn’t yet quoted Answers, perhaps you can let us know what you would do if you were PM for a week!

Alana

I don’t know about you, but I am not really a cold weather person – give me sun, surf and sand any day! But seeing as it is winter and the water temperature is a little cold, tonight I am all set to watch the first episode of Australia’s Celebrity Survivor, Vanuatu. There is nothing quite like watching celebrities roughing it on my 62 inch TV, while curled up under a blanket on the couch with my favourite snacks.

Over the last decade the whole reality TV thing has exploded.  These shows have made celebrities out of nobodies and increased the celebrity status of those already in the public eye. From dancing and singing, to ice skating and house sharing, Australians love their celebrity reality television!

It seems Australia’s very own Justin Melvey can do it all.  No one could have predicted that he would leave Home and Away to become a Shakespearean thespian.  Or that he would leave Australia and make it big in the world of daytime dramas like The Young and the Restless, Days of Our Lives and General Hospital. Can he dance his way into the final of this new island drama? Why not tell Justin what one item you would take to the island.

To find out what item Justin took with him, follow his adventures on Channel 7, Thursdays at 8.30pm and stay tuned for his future questions, exclusive toYahoo!7 Answers.

Alana

What started as a simple Q&A site last December is growing up to become a global forum where millions of people from all walks of life are coming together daily to build the world’s largest knowledge exchange.  The Answers community continues to amaze us every day with its depth of wisdom and insight, and we feel that the time has come to start providing the community with more tools to help us make Answers into an even more useful, fun, and interesting knowledge search site.

On Wednesday, we took the first major step toward enabling the community to have a larger voice in defining what is good quality content. We introduced the action bar, which gives you the ability to rate all questions and answers.  Level 2 Yamsters can register their opinion (thumbs-up/down) about whether a particular question or answer is contributing a positive or negative experience within the community. Because opinion-based ratings are a powerful way to determine the direction of the product, we’ve decided to give this privilege to Level 2 Yamsters to help discourage its abuse. The ratings will be used in future product releases to help showcase intriguing questions and other gems of insight gleaned from well-written answers, and let you avoid the types of content you might not want to see.  We’ve already gotten a lot of feedback from you about this feature, and so here is a separate FAQ for the ratings feature.

We’ve also started using what we know about spam filtering (like in email) to help us detect questions that violate the Answers community guidelines.  Just like an email spam filter, it isn’t always going to work perfectly, but it will continuously improve. Over time, we hope it will minimize your chance of encountering questions that violate the community guidelines.  In the months to come, we plan to use these filters on answers as well, reducing the unpleasantness of posting a serious question only to find that someone just answered “Thanks for the 2 points.”

The overall point system is evolving, too.  You saw that we raised the penalty for abuse violations from 2 to 10 points a few weeks back. We would rather encourage good citizenship than mete out negative points.  Over the next few months, you’ll be seeing additions to the Answers point system which will strive to more accurately reflect your contributions to the Answers community.  The Answers philosophy is that if you help out someone with an answer, or if you ask a question that others find intriguing, your profile should reflect that.

We want all of these things to be tools that allow the wonderful community to more directly influence and improve the Yahoo! Answers experience for everyone.  We are constantly amazed at the diversity, expertise, and most of all, the helpfulness of the Yamsters — it’s what makes Answers a special place.

Yahoo!7 Answers Team

Why should I rate questions?
Rating questions tells us which questions are interesting, intriguing, or simply worth asking.

Can I rate more than one answer to a question?
You can rate as many answers as you like for any question. Rating is not like voting, so you don’t have to pick just one best answer. One of the reasons for introducing this feature is to allow more people to provide feedback to all the answers, even if they’re not picked as the Best Answer.

When do I use the Report Abuse link? When do I use the thumbs-down button?
You should continue to use the Report Abuse link to report questions and answers that violate the Community Guidelines. What happens when I rate an answer with a thumbs down? When you rate an answer negatively, you’ll see that the answer disappears from your view. You can make it appear again by clicking on the Show link. This only affects your view, and doesn’t make it disappear for other users.

Will people use this feature to hide other people’s answers they disagree with?
Currently, negative ratings don’t hide anything from anyone else’s view. It’s very important for Answers to continue to provide a forum for the free exchange of ideas. We don’t intend the ratings to be a method of censorship. It allows your opinion to be heard, but doesn’t shut down a healthy debate.

Will people be mean, and target people they disagree with to rate their questions and answers negatively?
Negative ratings are not meant to be a personal attack on the author. A healthy debate of ideas requires both sides of the argument, and we believe the majority of Answers users believe this principle, also.

Why is rating functionality limited to Level 2 users and up?
As mentioned above, ratings is a powerful way for you to voice your opinion on the content of Answers, and determine the direction of the product. By waiting until you reach level 2 to exercise this privilege, we discourage abuse of the privilege.

Why don’t I get points for rating anymore?
During the first phase of the ratings rollout, we want to encourage users to rate questions and answers because they want to register their opinion, and not because it’s a fast way to get to the next level. As you know, we listen to the community, so as we find out more how people use the ratings, we may change this in the future. Please tell us what you think about this issue via a comment on this blog.

Don’t I get those bonus points from positive ratings on my best answers anymore?
No, you don’t. Again, the relationship between points and ratings will evolve over the next few months, but we intend to match our point system to reward answers that the community thinks is high quality.

Before John Woo was seduced by the bright lights and big bucks of Hollywood, he was already an award-winning film director, having made some classic action flicks in his home town of Hong Kong. His early films such as The Killer, Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow gained him a reputation as one of the hottest film-makers in the world, and since relocating to Hollywood he has directed such blockbusters as Broken Arrow, Face/Off, Mission Impossible 2 and Paycheck.

However John Woo is a man with more than just movies on his mind – he is also a big comic book and video game fan. His first question to the Yahoo!7 Answers community, which asks about society’s fascination with comic book superheroes, coincides with 7 Brothers, his recent foray into comics.

While there are no current plans for Woo to direct a comic superhero movie, this shouldn’t be discounted for the future as he clearly loves the genre. Anticpation for Woo’s next film is always running high amongst movie fans and one of his next projects, based on the epic Chinese tale of

NOTE: These updates will take a little time to take hold, so please forgive some of the quirkiness you may encounter over the course of the next few hours.

Thanks to your feedback, we’ve added a new feature — the action bar — which is conveniently located below each question and answer. The buttons allow you to give a “thumbs-up” or a “thumbs-down” rating or to flag abuse for all the content you find on Yahoo!7 Answers.
“How have ratings changed?”

If you’ve reached Level 2, you can use the rating buttons on the action bar to give questions and answers your stamp of approval or collapse the answers you don’t want to see. Everyone in the Answers community will be able to see the total number of “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down” ratings that each question or answer receives.

This new ratings system will be used to identify content that is valuable to the community, which means that your ratings will help make Yahoo!7 Answers better for everyone – it goes without saying, but the content quality we are shooting for is outlined in our Community Guidelines.

While we won’t be rewarding points for adding ratings anymore, we’re hoping that the ability to make the product better will be an incentive to continue using them.

“Wait, I still have some abuse to report … ”

Just because we’ve turned on ratings for all questions and answers doesn’t mean that we’ve abandoned abuse reporting. We gave the “report abuse” link a new look and moved it to the action bar, too. Everyone can and should continue to report abuse that violates Answers’ Community Guidelines.

Along with the action bar …

By popular demand, we are now displaying point levels under each person’s avatar on question and answer pages. You no longer need to go to the profile page to see a member’s point level. We are also moving the forums to a new home, so they will be inaccessible until all of the updating is completed.

We’ll be adding many more features focused on improving content quality in upcoming releases, so please continue to let us know what you think – you can leave us a comment below, and/or comment on the Answers Forum.

Yahoo!7 Answers Team

I was looking for something a little different to do last Saturday night so I decided to go to a night viewing at the Sydney Observatory.  I was treated to both naked-eye and telescopic views of stars, planets and the moon. It made me feel a little insignificant here on Earth when I thought about how many other planets and solar systems are out there… Is there life out there, somewhere? 

I was quickly brought back to Earth today when I heard Dr. Stephen Hawking’s  audio clip  based on his recent question on how the human race can survive the next hundred years. I am always amazed at how he can put forward so many complicated ideas in such a concise and succinct way.

Admittedly he doesn’t have an answer to this question. In fact, getting people involved in discussing this subject was his sole purpose for asking all along. Using his keen wit, he urges Answerers to think about more pressing matters than extinction level events like asteroid collisions. He even managed the throw in some humour based on a blockbuster movie!

If you want to discuss these issues rather than ask a question, discuss it here.

We are always interested in your thoughts on such fundamentally important topics such as this, so feel free to leave a comment below.

Alana