Yahoo!7 Answers Australia

It’s no surprise, mobile is getting bigger and bigger in the online world. Over a year ago, we introduced the mobile-optimised version of Yahoo!7 Answers, which is proving to be extremely successful amongst users on any device.

To make things easier for Android users, we developed an app that offered the Yahoo!7 Answers mobile experience outside of the browser. However, we noticed that most of our mobile users still access the site directly from their browsers. As a result, we decided to focus our resources in building better core experiences for Yahoo!7 Answers across devices. Effective today, we are retiring the app for Android, but don’t worry: you can still access the mobile version of Yahoo!7 Answers by visiting au.answers.yahoo.com OR nz.answers.yahoo.com from your favourite browser. Or if you already have the Android app downloaded, you’ll still be able to use it.

Thanks for reading,

Kate
Community Manager

Happy New everyone!

We are now a few weeks into 2012, how are you finding it thus far?

We’ve got a big year planned with the blog, but whilst we’re in the planning stages, we’d love to let you all have some input as well:

• What topics or areas of interest would you like to see covered on the Answers Blog in 2012?

Are there old things you miss, something you’d like to see changed or added? More guest bloggers or featured users? More or less of something? Let us know on the question above or in the comments below!

Kate
Community Manager

You might have noticed messaging surrounding the upcoming changes to Yahoo! Pulse. Here is a quick reminder that after December 1, 2011 you will no longer be able to use Pulse as it will be discontinued. We’re replacing Pulse with a new Profile, a simpler way to manage your settings and your identity in Yahoo!7.

Why the change?

We always strive to improve your experience on Yahoo!7. After evaluating tons of feedback from you, we decided Yahoo! Pulse was not meeting your needs. Yahoo! Profile is an easier way to identify who you are!

We’ve listed the main changes on when the transition occurs. To find out more info, please to go our Profile Help Pages or click on “see what this change means to you” on Pulse.

• We’ll transfer your Yahoo! Pulse information for you.
• Your social games will move to games.yahoo.com. Your apps will move to my.yahoo.com.
• There’s no updates feed.
• There are two privacy levels: public (visible to everyone) and private (visible only to you).
• Any profile information you had with the “connections” privacy level is now converted to private.
• It works on smartphones!

Have fun with Yahoo! Profile!

Part of the fun on Yahoo!7 Answers is having your questions answered, but sometimes our community forgets to pick a best answer.  That’s OK! We are launching a new email to remind our community that after you’ve asked your question, and it has received at least one answer, you’ll be sent the following “Choose a Best Answer” email 24 hours later:

Whatever criteria you use to choose a best answer is up to you!  But it’s important to choose a Best Answer so the question doesn’t end up in limbo. It’s also a great way to thank the user for helping or giving you the information you needed.  Go ahead, choose a best answer and award someone 10 points!

Thanks for reading!

On Friday, we let you know that Answers would be unavailable Tuesday, Sept 13th for several hours. We are happy to share that all maintenance was completed by 9pm last night as planned and the site is available again.

We apologise for any inconvenience. Thanks so much for your patience!

Kate
Community Manager

Photo by bucklava.

Yahoo!7 Answers will be unavailable on Tuesday, September 13th, from 3:00 pm to 9:00 pm AEST, due to planned maintenance. If there is any change to this schedule, we will update the information here.

If you’re looking for something to do during the downtime, here are some ideas:

• Explore something interesting on Flickr
• Catch up on old posts on the Answers blog
• Find a deal on Yahoo!7 Shopping
• Watch music videos on Yahoo!7 Music
• Check out full episodes of your favourite TV shows on PLUS7

Thanks for your patience.

Kate
Community Manager

We are happy to announce that Yahoo!7 Answers is back after the planned outage.

We can see from your hundreds of passionate comments on our blogs worldwide that you are all fond of the site and there are even a few Answerholics amongst you! So thank you from all of us for your patience.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Kate
Community Manager

Photo by bucklava.

Yahoo!7 Answers will be unavailable on Monday, May 16th, from 4:00 pm to 11:00 pm AEST, due to planned maintenance. If there is any change to this schedule, we will update the information here.

If you’re looking for something to do during the downtime, here are some ideas:

• Explore something interesting on Flickr
• Catch up on old posts on the Answers blog
• Find a deal on Yahoo!7 Shopping
• Watch music videos on Yahoo!7 Music
• Check out full episodes of your favourite TV shows on PLUS7

Thanks for your patience.

Kate
Community Manager

Currently, as a pre-requisite to participate on Yahoo!7 Answers, we ask that you have a Yahoo!7 ID to sign-in to the Yahoo!7 network.  This in turn is where your identity on both Yahoo!7 and Answers is managed from.

Now, as part of Yahoo’s moves to make the web a more social and open place we are opening up Answers to people with Google or Facebook IDs too.

We appreciate people don’t want to be overwhelmed by different logins for each site you want to participate in on the web and through a technology called OpenID we’re able to eliminate the need for multiple logins across different Web sites.

After you sign-in with your Google or Facebook ID you’ll be able to fully participate on Yahoo!7 Answers.

Check out this video to see how easy it is to sign-in with a Google or Facebook ID:

A few points to note:

• For existing Answers members you’ll still see all of your existing content when you login with your Yahoo!7 ID.  However you also have the option to ‘bind’ your Facebook/Gmail account with your Yahoo!7 account.  If you choose to do this you’ll be able to see all of your Answers content when logged in with either your Gmail or Facebook account.  Read this help page to find out how to do this*
• If you sign in with your Facebook ID you still control what is published to your Facebook feed from Answers through the checkbox on the ask/answer flow.  Your activity on Answers will not automatically be published on your Facebook feed.
• OpenID isn’t available for the Mobile version of Answers just yet… we’re working on it though and we expect to make it available in the coming months
• All participants using Google or Facebook IDs will still be subject to our Yahoo!7 ToS and Answers Community Guidelines when contributing to the site.

For further information on Yahoo! Fast Pass check out the Yodel Anecdotal blog post: http://ycorpblog.com/2011/01/18/id-sign-in/

We’ve made a few minor changes and bug fixes this week to both the desktop and mobile versions of Answers which we wanted to let you know about.

Here’s a rundown of the changes:

Mobile

Our new mobile experience has proven extremely popular with you all so far and many of you have given us feedback on what you’d like to see.  Taking this into account we’ve made a few tweaks:

• You can now star questions from the question page on mobile.
• We’ve now enabled ‘Show me another’ on iPhone and Android.  You can see further questions now by scrolling horizontally on each question page.

For those of you who use Android we want to let you know we’ve just created an Answers Android App!  This is free to download and works on Android phones version 2.0 or above.  Try it out by searching for “Yahoo! Answers” at the Android marketplace and let us know what you think of it!

Changes to the Desktop version of Answers

We’ve made a few cosmetic changes that you may see depending if you’re signed-in or signed-out of Answers.  Let’s explain how these affect each page on the Answers site:

Question Page changes

• Last month we made a change which moved edited answers to the bottom of the list.  Due to your overwhelming response against this change we have reversed it.  Now, when you edit an answer, we will display an edit time stamp but won’t move it to the bottom of the answer list. We feel this shows that the answer has been edited from the original submission without discouraging those who want to make genuine edits.
• Thumbs:  We’ve had extensive feedback around thumbs and this month we made the first of several changes to the rating system.  Further changes will come in the following months.
  • Thumbs up and Thumbs down will now only show when you are signed in to Answers.  When signed-out you will not see the Thumbs down icon but will see any positive ratings that have occurred.  This is how the signed out experience will look:

• We’ve moved the Report Abuse away from the thumbs on all answers whether you are signed in or out.  We hope this will stop you accidentally hitting the thumbs buttons when you mean to report abuse.
• Also when signed out and visiting a voting page, we now display a sign in to vote button at the top of the page to make it clearer on how to vote for your preferred answer.

My Activity Page

We’ve made a small cosmetic change to the My Activity page and made some technical improvements to improve performance on this page.

• Your identity information has now been modified slightly. We’ve moved your stats information to the right and now your contact information, nickname and start date to the central column.
• We now collapse “About Me” on your private view of My Activity. This means your content is higher on the page than before.
• There should now be no delay with your avatar appearing on the My Activity page after you’ve updated it. Previously there was a delay of up to 10 minutes of avatars updating on the My Activity page, this will now be instant.
• We’ve heard from those of you with lots of answers, activity or contacts that retrieving this information in the new My Activity page can be problematic.  We’ve made some tweaks here so should you should notice this is all displayed much smoother now.
• On rare occasions your nickname or avatar on the question page wasn’t taking you to My Activity page but to the public view.  This is now fixed and you’ll no longer be taken to the public view of My Activity.

As always we’re keen to hear your feedback on these changes and what you’d like to see on Answers. Leave a comment below or visit the Suggestion Board.