First thing’s first – there is NO secret language of Answers! To ask a good question you simply adhere to the Community Guidelines, use good punctuation and grammar and a bit of common sense.
Last week Clea blogged about why your question may have been deleted and we received a number of comments that I would like to address by giving a bit of advice on best practise.It may sound blatantly obvious, but well-written, thoughtful questions tend to receive well-written, thoughtful answers.
An example of a GOOD question is:
What should Australian teams do when the Kiwis are doing their haka? Make fun of it or show respect?
Notice that the responses tend to be written clearly, in a friendly, helpful tone, with great perfect spelling and punctuation.
An example of a BAD question is:
if i like a girl ho do i know if she likes me that way?
There was only one answer (which was thankfully polite) and I think it was very lucky to get that.
When you look at similar poorly written questions, you’ll notice that the answers are often equally baffling and incoherent. They may be legitimate questions but because they are very generalised, or with poor spelling and grammar, they are almost destined to generate poorly-written answers or none at all. Don’t forget that there’s a spell-checker just above the box where you type your question so take a few extra seconds to make sure your question is clear and understandable.
And remember, YOU play a key part in choosing best answers and giving the best answers more prominence, so cast your votes and rate the best answers. You will even pick up points just for doing it.
If you want to see an example of a brilliant answerer, check out morgan (no, he’s not an Aussie but we won’t hold that against him!), who has managed to maintain an incredible 90% of his answers judged as Best Answer. Wow!
Please take a couple of minutes to read over the Community Guidelines and Terms of Service (which you signed up for when you started using Answers), but here are two simple guidelines to remember: no profanity and no chatting. Please don’t swear as we’ve had to delete otherwise legitimate Q&As because profanity was slipped in.
Also, Answers is NOT a chat site or personals message board – it is a Q&A site where human knowledge can be shared. Therefore, questions like “Does my pic/avatar look hot?”, “Who wants to chat on IM?”, “What should I eat now?” and “Who wants a date with a cute Brisbane guy?” will be removed. If you want to chat, we recommend the Yahoo!7 Message Boards or Messenger.
Sometimes abuse escapes deletion and appears on the site. If you see a post which contravenes the guidelines, please help us by:
1) Not answering the question – questions with no answers are deleted automatically; and
2) Clicking on the “Report Abuse” link below the question – our customer care department will review all reports received and if there has been a violation of the community guidelines, appropriate action will be taken. Users will be suspended for continual abusive or otherwise inappropriate posts.
This may seem a little overwhelming, but it is just good old common sense! Happy asking and answering…
Alana
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