November 18, 2011 at 2:07 pm
New! Choose a Best Answer email
Part of the fun on Yahoo! 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!
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A more interesting idea would be a “no best answer” button for original asker since that’s what many answers are worth!
thank you
What’s the point?
Users who choose Best Answer will do so whether prompted or not.
Those who don’t, won’t.
Send the ‘Choose BA’ message after one hour, when the option becomes available. Most answers are received within an hour of posting the question, and by 24 hours later, the question has been forgotten.
Thank you for introducing this new feature.
It is very important for a user to choose the ‘right answer’ as the ‘best answer’. I’m emphasizing on this because – one of the answers (which violated the Yahoo Community guidelines) for my question got selected as the Best Answer through a voting process, which I was not aware of.
Even today, the question with the answer remains live on the Yahoo Answers site.
So, this new feature would act as a reminder.
It’s the good idea that you inform people to choose the BA, but there are a lot of askers who don’t even select BA. You might want to remind the asker each day that he/she has the question pending and needs to clear it up for convenience.
It is good idea,”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”
I really wish that questions in voting could go through a better system.
I love it
This is great, and now it’s high time for a new picture on the “your answer was chosen as best” emails.
I love getting the B/A emails, but after 6 long years I am sick to death of looking at the bottom of that girl’s dirty feet staring me in the face every time I get a B/A.
Change it PLEASE !!!
Pick ME
Go received a version of that e-mail 5 YEARS ago when I asked my first question. This is NOT new, unless you discontinued it somewhere along the line.
I wish this could also go into “voting” questions, this sounds like a good system
I appreciate the idea behind these emails, but is there a way to make receiving them optional? Or to choose when to get them (after 1, 2, or 3 days)?
I like to leave my questions up for about 3 days so there’s time to get more answers. I’ve gotten a few of these emails but they just get deleted right away (since I won’t be choosing an answer for a couple more days).
If this isn’t possible, no problem. Just wondered if this could work.
I love using Yahoo! answers, and this helps solve one of the more frustrating problems about using it. It feels so much better to have the person who asked the question give the best answer the ten points than for voters, who usually end up being the answerers themselves. I would also suggest that you might want to allow the asker to give more than ten points to heighten the incentive for answers to be directly helpful to the one who put the question up.
Thank you for setting up something our community desperately needs in such a fun kinda way!
Thank goodness, I hope this will work since voters usually vote for their own answers instead of the one that best answers the question
Good plan i feel like a lot of new people on the site don’t know about best answers or don’t know how to choose and this will help fix that moment when you write a novel addressing there problem and get no response back.
This seems like a great way to show appreciation to someone who has helped you!!
Wow! time to exhale.
Great idea. Some of us put a lot of thought into our answers and would like to not have to go through the voting process.
This would be totally awesome !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There already is a “no best answer” choice for the asker, either extend your question, or delete it before it goes into voting.
Sounds quite healthy.
Seems like a nice idea.
You give points for answering a question, yes? You take points to ask a question, yes? Don’t take the points, or cut the point cost in half for asking, then levy a heathy point penalty if the asker does not choose an answer. Even if it’s no best answer. Make people pay attention to their questions. And stop putting all those pop up boxes on my screen. It slows my computer down somethign terrible. And the animated ads really all suck. I make it a point to not shop or buy from any of the places I can remember on a rotten ad. (My idea of rotten, that is. If it annoys me, it’s rotten. Most of them do.)
I like to leave my questions up for about 3 days so there’s time to get more answers.
What would be wrong with letting the asker choose “best answer!!” for one and also “good answer!” for the ones that were almost as good, or were helpful contributions … it would make the “Top Contributor” selection more fair. (It’s somewhat tilted to fast answers over thoughtful ones, as it is.)
i like it very much_ this is awesome!!!!!!!!
nice idea……..
that a nice thing to add
I think 3 days should be given because once you pick a “best answer”, no one else can answer it.
Someone mentioned above that this was already in use when we would get similar reminder. However, it’s good that you have decided to reintroduce the same now.
Add a comment: I would request that you also do the same for any ‘comment’ posted after the BA has been selected. The comment-box is so much neglected that you would find this message in majority of the resolved Questions: “There are currently no comments for this question.”
Anyone reading above lines and act please?
I think you should improve the voting system. Did you know that I can actually go back to questions that I answered a while ago that haven’t been voted on yet, and then vote for my own answer, and get 10 points for it? And while it doesn’t list the names of the answerers when voting, I can always tell which one is mine. I don’t know how many times I have done that.
Instead of sending it after 24 hours, please send it after 3 days. People seem to think that Y!A is an instant response medium. The person who can give you the best answer is often the busiest. Cutting off answers too quickly robs people of an answer from someone who actually knows the answer, not just someone who games for points.
As a member of TieBusters, I appreciate the attempt to resolve questions, but a reminder at 3 days would be more useful. And requiring askers to vote before they ask another question would be even more helpful.
This is an ok feature but yeah, I don’t think it will do much.
Something else to consider would be a system where, after a certain ammount of time, questions that have a split on best answer (2 answers at 50% of votes each or 3 at 33% for example) would have an answer selected from the split based on the numbers of thimbs up … it would help resolve ALOT of questions that are still outstanding.
Oh and another feature I would like to see is email notification when someone deletes a question so I can block them in the future.
another worthless feature for the site I love to hate.
Fantastic, a good way to go yet
I’m with Valentin. If I don’t pick a best answer, it’s because there was none… not because I forgot about it.
Quite often I would like to clarify or ask additional information relating to the question. Is there any way you could adapt the questions from being so rigid? Most technical problems are not easily answered with one short answer and require extensive investigation which could be done with follow ups to the question. This is particularly true when the person asking the question has not supplied all the information. This would allow better answers and more accurate results.
Good idea.I suggested it sometime ago.If you are going to do it , include a way to know when a question has been deleted for whatever reason so there is no wasted time and effort to answer it.Plus as another commentator said ,maybe you can eliminate or reduce the point deducted for asking a question.
24 hrs is way too soon! I like it but please give us 3 days. Many of us do not live online. Please and thanks!
Are you serious? My inbox isn’t clogged up enough with pointless garbage as it is? I don’t even care whose answer is the best. There better be an opt-out option on that thing.
great idea!
Someone said that they should have a “No Best Answer” button. They already have that.
Also, they used to send a reminder email to choose the best Answer and people still didn’t do it.
One good idea would be to penalize people 1 point for not choosing a Best Answer 24 hours after the reminder email is sent.
YA should consider allowing the questioner to award a second place ‘best answer’ since there are often times when several great answers are provided.
Its a good idea.
This is good but doesn’t fully resolve the issue. The question is still open for an initial period of 4 days, which becomes 8 if you extend it.
The old “Heads Up” reminder came after 2 days, and if you didn’t act on it there was no further reminder when you reached 4 or 8 days, therefore the question could be forgotten and slip into “In Voting” status.
This new “Choose a Best Answer” reminder comes after only 1 day and you may wish to wait a little longer. If there is still no further reminder when you reach 4 or 8 days, the question could again be forgotten and slip into “In Voting” status.
No, this is bad. I get harassed by six emails at once as it is and I cannot block! Aargh! How about a button to turn these off for a poor gmail account!! : (
Grr, makes me less wanting to pick now.
“Someone said that they should have a “No Best Answer” button. They already have that.”
They only have that once the question has gone to voting. The asker can not choose it to close the question.
Also, as someone else pointed out up there.. usually the best answers are the ones that take time, and come from busy people who know the answer, not just trolls who answer every question they see for easy points. Having this email at 3 days would be more useful.
I recently got one 1 day after asking a question. What did I do? I deleted it without opening, because I already know my question has not been adequately answered.
As a person who votes al ot I like any attempt to halt the number of questions going to unresolved status. I read above a suggestion for a no best answer button available to be available to the asker. I didn’t realise it wasn’t available but i think it would be a big help to some people who just give up on their question as they feel ( in many cases rightly so) it wasn’t answered in any seriousness.
It’s a shame yahoo cannot keep track of the isp number and send a message direct to the screen whether in yahoo at the time or not
but i applaud yahoo answers for making an attempt , well done.
A question gets it’s answers within 8 hours of being asked… give or take a few hours. What makes the difference there? How active that particular category is. Why is this true? Because people answer the questions on the FIRST PAGE of questions within a category. People do not go digging through pages of questions to find one to answer. If you do not understand why this is true, then you have never TRIED digging through pages of questions to find some to answer.
Think really hard about it. If it takes a few second to scan the question titles on the first page… by the time you have read them all, new questions have been asked. If you click on the link to go to page 2 of questions, half of the questions on the 2nd page WERE on page 1 while you were reading that page… and have now been pushed to page 2 because it took you time to read. So you are regularly chasing questions by digging deeper. Then, if you actually take the time to ANSWER questions…, the ones you did not answer are being pushed back through the pages even faster.
So people who think a question needs to marinate for 3 or 4 days to get good answers don’t ever pay attention to the date stamp on the answers they get. Sure… they might get a long and good answer a few HOURS after they ask their question… but not a few days.
I read some mail like this a couple days ago and thought, wow, they finally changed their notification and made it more encouraging, but to be honest, it is a little too little, and a little too late. I critizesed your former reminder message about three years ago and nothing happened, and many of your community members were disstisfied with your old message, too. So what you opted for is really a good thing, but it’s way, way too late.