June 15, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Do’s and Don’ts
Here at Yahoo!7 Answers, we strive to provide quality content for the community. Every day, trusted users work together to report and remove any content that violates the Community Guidelines. Since abusive content is the most talked-about topic, here is a refresher on what we expect from our users.
Do:
- Show courtesy to your fellow community members
- Ask and Answer clearly
- Share what you know
- Cite your sources
- Categorise your questions correctly
- Star/Thumbs-up great questions and answers
- Report abuse
Don’t:
- Rant – Posting questions with the sole aim of giving your opinions is a no-no. So is answering questions for the purpose of venting. When you post a question, it must be written in the form of a question. When you answer, it must attempt to answer the question being asked.
- Insult others or be obscene – Sexually explicit content and images are not welcome on the site. We also do not tolerate any form of insult, discrimination or hate speech. Answers is a diverse community, hence everyone should be respected.
- Spam – Answers is not a recruiting site, a dating site or an advertising billboard. Posting irrelevant links for personal or financial gain is prohibited.
- Cheat – Creating multiple accounts to reward yourself, copying and pasting other people’s answers and asking for points are all infractions.
- Be harmful and violent – promoting violence or harmful practices and threatening or harassing other users violates the guidelines. Anything that is considered illegal in everyday life is also illegal on Answers.
- Share illegal content – You can share information about where to download free entertainment and programs as long as it’s a free and legal download site.
We have received many questions about why this or that was deleted, and we think these explanations will help you better understand the Community Guidelines. In extreme cases, members risk losing their Yahoo! ID, and consequently, access to all other Yahoo!7 services. If everyone follows the rules, content quality will be at its best.
Have more questions? Leave us a comment and let us know!
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Short & precisely explained. Fantastic
I know there are many others out there in Answers, that have made it to become a top contributor, only to have it taken away from us, because we have come across, someone who was cut, copy and pasting another persons question and have pulled them up on it, only for yahoo answers to come along and take it away from the ones who are honest. So yahoo you are punnishing the wrong person, as the bad guy gets away.
This is a great summary of the rules. They should be posted up all over the site, a few at a time.
PLEASE include on the Violation Notices what the user has been reported for. Especially with chatting and ranting, they don’t FEEL they’ve been doing it, so they are totally mystified when the VN arrives.
You could put a checklist of 20 violations on the report form, each linked to the matching clause of the CG. This would
1) stop reports on items that don’t break any rules
2) standardise the terms used,so you can easily do statistics on violations
3) make it easy to copy the reason to the VN, so the user gets TOLD what they are reported for.
This will reduce spurious reports and spurious appeals, making less work and causing less resentment (one major cause of deliberate trolling behaviour). It only costs a one-off simple programming job to achieve this.
ALSO please add a report button (or a checkbox on the form) for “bulk” type reports, eg spammers, obscene avatars, point-gaming etc where the report is about behaviour that spans numerous postings. Currently these are impossible to report except by email, which again is putting more work on you unnecessarily.