Changes to desktop and mobile
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:
Choose Best Answer, Edit Answer & Additional details pages
We’ve updated these pages to our new look and feel that you see when asking or answering. By improving the code behind these pages too this should resolve some of the issues that occasionally occurred with special characters and text wrapping.
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’d love to hear your feedback on these changes and what you’d like to see on Answers.
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“a small cosmetic change to the My Activity page” was pointless.It was better the other way with the mailbox on the right.Other than that,I like it.Thank you.
I’m sure going to miss that drop – it was the best way to defend against copies and stop games, such as avatar games – bad move (the gamers and the lazy won fair and square though)
The removing the edit drop DOES NOT stop a user from totally changing a wrong answer to a correct one that is posted by someone else.
Not being able to change the original answer would be the best thing to do as copying would be there for all to see, as it is now it still allows cheating to happen and be hidden.This is prevelant in music categories, wrong answers get thumbs down and correct ones get thumbs up so the cheater knows what answer to change theirs to. They copy the correct answer google the lyrics post them they and will get best answer by cheating.
I think the changes are good except when you are on a question, there are no open or resolved questions at the bottom….
I liked it when Y!A moved edited answers to the bottom of the list. The good far outweighed the bad. A shame it has now been changed back just because of a small vocal minority.
What Y!A should have done is move edited answers to the bottom of the list, but do not show the edit time stamp!!!
Thanks for switching back the edit option. I hate having to kill an answer by sending it to the bottom because of a spelling mistake.
I think the “About Me” collapse is pointless. Switch it back. Who cares if it brings up your Q&A higher, it’s not going to kill you to scroll down a bit.
And for some reason, it’s not showing any “Open/Resolved Questions” at the bottom for top of the page when I go to view a question. Can you please fix this?
On the plus side, thank you for fixing the edit bump. Don’t listen to the naysayers here. It was a nuisance.
how about adding a flag as miscategorized button, so we can clean up all of the questions that clog up the wrong sections of the site, so that people are not inappropriately given violations for pointing an asker to the proper section of the site
We appreciate your removing the edit drop because we are typo challenged and are forever going back to correct errors. Thanks so much!
Hi: I keep track of my Best Answers score. Since you changed things, I have to do a subtraction of total answers minus the answers that were not scored as Best Answers to get my Best Answers. I liked it the old way when you just listed how many answers were Best Answers. Can’t you please just put this part back – otherwise, I like the other changes you have made. Good stuff. Thanx
I have a blackberry curve 8330. When I log on to Yahoo Answers, I cannot see if anyone has rated my answers (thumbs up or down)
The thumbs down feature is an important feature of this site. It prevents people editing answers to add in disagreemnets with other answers, and allows answers that are rude and unhelpful (but not in full violation of the TOS) to be ranked down. Please don/t remove it.
It is unbelievably hard to believe that anyone would vote for the edit drop. The edit drop was nothing but a nuance and made everyone who wanted to answer angry. I am extremely glad it’s finally eliminated. The drop did nothing except waste everyone’s time. Thank you for reversing it.
I preferred it when the Open and Resolved questions of a particular category where displayed at the bottom of the page. Even if you don’t want to send the Open questions back to the bottom of the page, the least you can do is bring back the Resolved questions because some of us liked to go through those questions
I’m glad that the edit drop was removed. I use the edit to be able to fix a spelling error or to answer an additional part of the question if the asker posts additional details and it bothered me that I’d be put to the bottom for it.
I think edits shouldn’t move you down, but edits should only allow you to append information to your answer – not change your original answer.
Please do not remove the thumbs down! While it is abused in certain catergories (like P&S) and can by annoying, it is an important function in many of the other categories that requires a factual answer, where I have had to thumbs down an answer that was patently wrong. It will only start a flame war between answerers if Y!A removes it, when a simple thumbs down is sufficient.
Hi Y!AT
Regarding edited answers not dropping anymore, thought there was going to be two timestamps, the original time and when the answer is edited. I know there are programming issues but can’t can’t you somehow seperate the rollover pop-out box for the original time, then have the edited time only showing in the rollover pop-out box? Also Can the edited text be somehow hi-lighted in bold so you don’t lose the flow of what has been re-written for a few minor errors?
Yes when I first saw the “? person rated this as good” box when signed out thought the glitch was back, good to see the “? person rated this as bad” is gone, though do wonder what you are going to replace it with…*Waits in anticipation* for that one…And moving the report box (though it isn’t in a box anymore)…having it on it’s own away from the answer button and the ‘ratings’ is a good move people won’t get so confused as for what each function is for.
The “About Me” being collapsed TD for that one, it was un-necessary space on the profile page…but at least others can see it when they check out someones profile.
Now hope this comment posts, because my other one didn’t post for some reason, when I tried to submit it again it took me to a page that said ‘this comment has been duplicated” or something like that…The mystery of posting on blogs…Can’t edit or delete stuff on here
Regards
STA
mobile app is excellent – i like that i can view all the folders on a single page now, instead of scrolling about 10 pages to go thru all of the folders that i have set up to organize my email
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next order or business… make a flag as mis-categorized button, or something for questions… it is really annoying with all the questions in the wrong sections of the sites, and obviously it is a violation to point out what section a question should be asked in (which is just plain stupid)
love the changes, just wanna ask one more change be made. on mobile, i’m unable to see thumbs up or down on answers. it would be great if they became visible. thanks!
how desktop back ground change without using tools
I wish that I could tell in the e-mail telling me I have a best answer whether it was rated by the asker, or by others. If it is the asker, I go back to the question to see if a comment has been made. If it is another yahooer, I smile and delete the e’mail.
Truthfully, I could care less…Good job!
I hate the new changes ! The website was better before.
I agree with Code to Joy… the edits to answers should be like the edits to questions; it should be an addition, not a substitution to what was already written.
Also, The mobile app is nice enough to be able to access, but I can’t see any part of my account history except the last few answers/questions.
I also miss having the “recent questions” at the bottom of any question screen. It let me see if new questions were asked right when I finish answering a question, plus it helped me to see some of the blatant spammers (insurance, payday loans, etc) to report them. Why was that taken away?
Aside from that, I like the other changes. The faster question posting is REALLY nice and the edit time stamp can be very helpful (although overwriting the original time has it’s deficits, too). Changing the answers editing part to be more like the questions editing part seems like the best solution to me.
Why is my new mail now located at the bottom of the page, so that I have to scrool over old messages to get to the new?
Thx!
We noticed a welcome change today and want to thank you for it. Previously, we had not been able to correct mistakes after we asked a question and wanted to add comments. Thanks so much for making that so much more functional. We are typo-challenged and appreciate all the help you can give us.
Y!A should completely remove the report abuse button to stop its misuse by report trolls!
I def. LOVE the new app but find myself using the regular mobile version as it has the stars and thumbs!
I would use the app more if these options were available!
PLEASE leave both open AND resolved questions at the bottom as it was. I don’t solely want to see the same unanswered questions. It was nice to read through some interesting resolved questions while still being able to answer a question with a single click.
Come on, things were fine as they were. I like change – but this one is stupid.
Any chance those deleted questions and best answer questions stuck in the in voting section will ever get removed?
I hate it!! I hate every changes there doing to every site! i think we should of have the choices to choose weather or not we want moblie themes now i can’t view pics? Or message freely in fanfiction.net !!! Has anyone notice that ? What gives =/.
I don’t understand why the thumbs down got removed unless you are signed in? I actually enjoyed the feature because I could tell which answers were funny and entertaining and which ones were also spam. Everyone has a right to agree or disagree, so why would you take away our freedom of speech?