August 26, 2009 at 9:10 am
Servicing the site—product update
Recently we’ve had feedback that a few glitches on the site have been impacting the overall experience for many of you, which we apologize for.
So, like an automobile that occasionally needs to be sent to the mechanic for some re-tuning, we had to send Answers to the repair shop for a little bit of maintenance.
We’ve now taken it off the blocks, and here are the fixes you’ll see from this latest release:
- Many of you were not regularly receiving immediate email notifications when your network posted a question. We appreciate how vital it is to get your questions to your Answers network promptly, and we have now fixed this to ensure that everyone receives the emails on time.
- One bug that has been a frustration to many of you for a while now is that people whom you’ve added to your “Blocked users” list are still be able to post answers to your questions. This will no longer happen. Blocked users will no longer be able to answer your questions—we’re sure some of you will be delighted to know this!
- When questions were in voting status, we’d noticed the total number of votes were not adding up correctly. After sending the Yamster to a quick math refresher course, we now have the correct totals back on display again.
- A couple of months ago, we introduced inactive hyperlinks for Level 1 users. To continue to protect the community against potentially malicious links, we’ve made some improvements to this functionality to ensure that the right to post hyperlinks is earned by trust only.
Finally, we’ve also laid the groundwork for some more radical changes to certain parts of the site design…so watch this space!
Keep your feedback coming, and we’ll continue to work on keeping the site well-oiled.
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Finally!!!!!!
BTW… can’t you just answer a question asked by someone that has you blocked by signing out, clicking on the question, clicking answer, then signing back in? Or did you find a way to fix this?
yes just dont heat it up in a plastic cup or bowl.
Yay! WOOHOO!!
What about the unreliablity of the “Thumbs down/Thumbs up” option-the only way a Y!A! member may “take the pulse” of his response. We want to believe that this is not an intentional manipulation, although for some reason I don’t understand how it worked reliably for years and now has failed and on a “good day”, is merely “unreliable.”
Another ‘glitch’ is when reporting abusers such as the one I reported who was advocating killing the president and wondering if he would be justified. I was totally ignored and there his question sits as an example of the ludicrousness of yahoo answers community board. Meanwhile perfectly good accounts get yanked because of the pettiness of some users.
uhm the thumbs ups and thumbs downs are still messing up. one minute they are like, for example, “2 ups, 1 down” then when you refresh the page it goes to “0 ups 0 downs.” then when you refresh it AGAIN it goes back. this is annoying.
can you also remove the thumbs down? whats the use.
thakns for at least fixing SOMETHING about yahoo though
Thanks for the changes! Great job!
Thanks for the get mail from answers!
The biggest drawback I have found in attempting to respond with a meaningful answer is the inability to format my answer. Often, a user would like to know how a citation in MLA format should look, etc., and I can only try to explain what should be italicized, how many spaces, what gets indented, what gets underlined, and so on. It would be so much more efficient if there were formatting options available to the asker and the answerer.
I would very much like to see a subsection in the food and drink section just for baking. I am sure there are many other bakers who are behind me on this one!!!
:):)
So pleasepleasepleaseeeee
Congrats for putting a kibosh on the Level 1 link work arounds. Great job team.
Mutt… they fixed that….
Yea – I’ve been noticing the thumbs ups and down being off latly too.
“# A couple of months ago, we introduced inactive hyperlinks for Level 1 users. To continue to protect the community against potentially malicious links, we’ve made some improvements to this functionality to ensure that the right to post hyperlinks is earned by trust only.”
Care to expand on this a little? Something new here, or is “earned by trust only” referring to attaining Level 2?
Glad to hear that more is on the way.
Ecstatic that you are blogging about the product,
please no radical changes…i like this site just the way it is!!
Thanks for fixing some stuff. There is a new problem now,some of the SBRs broke the suggestion board.
As you work to improve the site (and I do commend your efforts) are you planning to do anything about the number of users who openly state that they are 9, 10, 11, or 12 years old? It was my impression that users must be at least 13. Based upon SOME of the stuff I have seen posted in questions and answers an age requirement seems judicious.
I just recieved 2 Best Answers. I went to click on them and they said they were deleted. Also, I just achieved Level 2 status yesterday, just logged in and some of my points are missing, so now I’m back down to a level 1 AGAIN! I had over 260 points yesterday and today I only have 200 points. On top of that I went to look at the questions that I answered and it says I didn’t answer any questions yet!! I was on Y!A yesterday answering questions! What the heck? The update might be okay for some people but it really screwed up my profile. I just want to see credit where credit is due.
One thing that has gotten lots of complaints is the Community Moderation system. What has been done to fix that??? Some fixes are also needed in the Customer (We Don’t) Care area.
Have not received all the points for best answer.
Also, noticed that voting for a best answer, it shows up as a thumbs up.
to: marqueen71
age requirements are useless people just lie about their age, plus there shouldn’t be any discrimination to those younger or older. also those who are not of a mature age to be answering all questions should be monitored by their parent or guardian
I agree about formatting. Do you realize how hard it is to give proper coding examples in the programming and design section when you can’t have indentations? Sometimes someone will have a huge block of code that needs to be looked at, and it’s like like, daunting to try and read uncommented code that is also not indented.
Indenting is like, the first thing you learn in programming, this is very important to me. I do not wish to have to count out the period points before each statement. PLEASE allow tabs and spaces, even if it means some sort javascript, or php code to automatically process the input to replace trailing spaces with the html equilivance of a hard space. That would be so amazing T__T
“Recently we’ve had feedback that a few glitches”
How about the bugs and requested features that have been around for several YEARS? A list of the things that will never be changed would be nice.
Hi I am fairly new to this so I don’t know if you have an answer to my question posted somewhere else already, but is there any way to knowwhile you are in ther middle of composing an answer if the question still exists? I just spent an hour writing the best, most thoughtful answer I could give to a very disturbing question about whether I would rather see the President dead or Sen. Kennedy dead… and when I submitted my answer, I received a notice that the question was no longer there. This has happened to me several times and it is very frustrating because I take answering these questions very seriously and would like to avoid wasting my time and energy on unproductive projects. Is there a solution? Thank you for your help!
I would like the math feature improved to put real symbols. I know this may be asking 2 much but it’ll be easier 2 explain solutions. So to add to the “Grammar Format” comment, there should also be a box for “Mathamatical Format”. Oh, and a feature for foreign language too.
I would like to see something done to stop malicious rogue psychotrolls (RPT) who target individual(s), seek out their Q&A, and report everyone of the user’s Q&A to intentionally cause a user suspension. This is done in rapid succession from a chain of violation notices with close time stamps. Hence, if you had a filter to identify this activity from one IP address, you would be able to block this type of abuse on the site.
There is an amazing amount of duplicate SPAM posted by different accounts seemingly set to post to different questions for about ten minutes and then the next account posts, then the next, the next, etc. Is there any way to disable accounts that post the SPAM?
Also, a level one person can have their links accessed just by pushing the answer button. That is good for the real people but bad that SPAMmers can do it too.
I think it would be good if the Guidelines gave examples of questions that are not allowed because I had one question (about sand that makes sounds I saw on PBS) that was deleted but still don’t know what was wrong with it so I don’t know how to not ask a question like it. I am trying to do the right things all the time. I’m not perfect but I’m trying to be…
WTF!
you fixed ALL that but NOT the thumbs up/thumbs down problem..I’m disappointed
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Only ‘recently’?…lol
Does anyone in ‘support’ read the forums?
There should be some way of reporting a USER, not just their REPLY to a particular question. If one spammer is posting their spam dozens of times in response to dozens of questions, we ought to have a “Report Abuse” button that will enable us to call this spammer to the attention of the moderators, so they can go in and wipe out ALL his replies at once, instead of making us go through the multi-click, multi-page reporting process for every single time we see the same repeat spammer.
Some of the questions in Men’s Health and Women’s Health are quite candid. They sound as though the people sincerely want some information about their physical functions or their sex lives.
If I respond, I write seriously, avoid “trigger terms”, and try to be both helpful and accurate. Just recently, some of these posts have been deleted. I don’t know if it’s because the poster deletes them after getting an answer, or if someone who is very prudish complains that the subject is too frank.
In any case, it’s frustrating to spend time and effort writing a serious answer, only to have it vanish into the fourth dimension.
im glad that now the users i blocked cant bother me anymore
another great job by yahoo
Thanks a lot, guys! I love y’all
I have changed my email address twice so that my notifications can be sent solely to the new address and confirmation to verify still sends emails to my old address even after I have removed it form my info. Tech support, what little there is, has been of no help whatsoever.
yes just dont heat it up in a plastic cup or bowl.
Comment posted on August 26th, 2009 at 9:41 am by kay
Since a year, top 10 answerers in different categories for Australia, India and New Zealand were missing and not corrected despite positive feedback by me several times. Today, I find that they are missing even for USA. When I checked in blog, I realized that maintenance has been undertaken. Hope this positive feedback will also get attended.
Where have the top tens gone? Are there no leaders any more? That’s sad.
Yay FINALLY
Sweet, but i was hoping this had been fixed:
When people ask a question about New Zealand.. The suggested category is “Travel > Australia & New Zealand > General – Australia & New Zealand” having that selected there questions will end up In Other – Australia insteed of the New Zealand section.. it’s really annoying because there’s constantly a fair bit of NZ questions in the Australia section.. and few in the actual Other – New Zealand section.. And they usually don’t get as many as answers as they should if they ended up in the NZ section. It will only correctly end up in the NZ section if they browse catergorys and select it that way.. Hope this is fixed soon… :]
now if you can just rid the site of the report monkeys.
Categoriwise Top 10 Answerers for Australia, India and New Zealand continue to be missing though they have been restored for the remaining countries. This has been the case since more than a year despite my sending positive feedback through different methods. How long this discrimination continue for these three countries?
Hi Y!AT
That is great news about the block user feature working now…Good job Y!AT!
And about having more details with the actual Violation Notice, can’t wait to see one of those. It will bring better understanding for everybody ‘reasons’ and all that…
Thank you for fixing the bugs. There would be lesser problem now in Yahoo answers. I hope you can add more additional features here! Thanks.