Limitations on Level 5, 6 and 7 Users
As always, we believe in keeping Yahoo! Answers healthy and free from abuse. And this positive change is no exception.
We all know you enjoy earning points and moving up through the levels. But we are also aware of people taking advantage of the unrestricted limits to spam and publish low quality answers, such as “Thanks for the 2 points” or “I don’t know.”
Starting today we have modified our limits for Level 5, 6 and 7 users. This will help us protect the community from spam and help those who want good, serious answers.
Instead of the generous unlimited questions, answers and comments, we have now changed it to 20 questions, 80 answers and 40 comments. Please see the table below:
We believe these limits will still allow you to full enjoy Yahoo! Answers. If you’re hitting the limits, we suggest that you be more selective and focus on those questions/answers you have more to share about.
We aim to increase content quality and this change is just the beginning of many. Please know that we are always working towards a better experience for you, the community. We welcome your feedback below.
Thanks for reading,
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The weekly leaderboards won’t be as exciting, but 400 votes per day should keep them plenty busy enough.
Will we be allowed to go back and add/edit more info to our answers?
This would greatly improve the quality — “increase content quality” — of my good, serious answers.
Okay. Personally, I think this is a terrible idea. It might cut down a little on the spam, but most of the people who actually make it to level 5 or higher aren’t trolls and are actually conributing. I’ve been working my butt off trying to get to level 6 and the unlimited answers was very helpful in that. With this new change, I’m probably going to be using Y! Answers a lot less.
You just lost a very, very active user.
You have basically reduced YA to four levels. You should have kept at least some differentiation in the Q&A numbers, even if small. It is odd that you claim it will help with spam and trolls since all they have to do is set up multiple accounts. The Indian call girl group is the best example of that. This will impact few spammers and trolls.
What would make more of an impact is to get the CM system back working. Since the last collapse, it has really never come back on line. Some believe good users lost their reporting reps they had earned, but for sure there are hundreds of violations that became immune no matter how many reports have been made. When “Am I pretty?” questions dropped quickly in the past, they don’t now. The worst part is the staff is silent.
*Applause*
Good move!
This seems to unfairly punish those who have dedicated themselves to giving good answers on this site. If nothing else, you should at least differentiate between the answering limits for Levels 4, 5, 6 and 7, not just the amount of voting. Now, there is really NO difference between the answering ability of those with a mere 2,500 points – and those with over 25,000 points. Is THAT what we’ve worked for all this time? I don’t think so. This move saddens me deeply, after all my years on YA.
Why not just add 20, but keep a limit, ie 5- 100, 6=120, 7=140? so you still have something to work towards? If the issue is non answers, I see plenty of that from level 1 or 2 users, this is probably because these are troll accounts, actually see some saying, I can’t believe I made it to level 3 without being suspended, crazy huh. I don’t think punishing all users is the answer, not that I often go above 100 answers anyway, er 80
yeah, edits should not count as answers
to be honest i dont like it cause right now im not working due to several surgeries and would spend a lot of time trying to help people with their problems and i feel like i’ll be limited in doing that, might have to spend the rest of the time answering questions on another answer site, yahoo answers is one of my favorites and i didnt want to be limited and i worked hard so i feel i dont deserve that
In my opinion change is not for the better, for it rewards those below level 7 the same as a level 7 user, who has earned the rewards, maybe its time to make more levels like 8,9 &10 limiting answers also linmits access to your advertising
Great to have 400 votes. I did 400 today but the notice that you have reached the daily voting limit still does not show.
YES! YES! YES! and more to come? WOW! you’re back in business! Can’t wait for the next move.
This new limit won’t increase quality. People will continue to ask unoriginal questions, and people will continue to answer with “I don’t know”. They’ll find ways around this rule (with multiple accounts, etc.)
The only people who are really being hurt by this rule are the ones who DO give helpful answers, as their answering capacity is now seriously diminished. I can understand some limit, but going up in the levels should award some privilege not awarded to lower levels.
I feel like this new rule won’t have it’s intended effect, and I’ll be honest, I’m quite bothered by it, because I spent ages trying to get to level 7, and now it’s pointless to be.
Way to go! What a great step in the right direction!
Great…. I guess I’ll be trying to find a different site with no stupid limit. I enjoy answering questions and I try to answer well on all questions. I don’t want to be limited.
Get stricter punishments for those giving stupid answers, don’t punish those who just enjoy answering.
I finally make it to level 5, thinking i had achieved something special, and now this? BS. I am sorry, but now you are REWARDING those who are already at level 7 with tens of thousands of points. I would argue to remove the leaderboard then, because that isnt fair at all to us.
This limit prevents you from editing your answers to provide additional information. I’ve asked for clarification on some questions then been unable to edit my answer as I’ve run out of posts. This is a seriously impinging limit for the Yahoo!Answerers. Can I ask that you revise it to a more graded system and possibly have more severe penalties for spam answers?
Although I can appreciate why you are limiting the amount of answers, it does feel a little bit unfair for those answerers who do give good answers. Not to worry though, I am sure we will get used to it. Perhaps the ones who are causing problems will leave the site and we can increase the answers for levels 6 and 7.
They just took all the privileges for following the community guidelines away. Like somebody else said, now Level 4 is no different than 7.
And the great privilege for being Level 7 is voting??? Who votes that much anyway?
Once again, abusers change things for people who AREN’T doing it.
To me this is like parents who punish all their kids so they get the guilty one.
If they would deal with the idiots who ruin this site more effectively they wouldn’t have to do this.
But instead they let that idiot ask what race he looks like 15 times a day, and punish level 7 accounts
Excellent.
This will enhance quality over quantity, and this mechanism will work.
Those who find themselves unhappy about the answer limit may have *too much time* on their hands… perhaps devote more time per answer instead?
sk.
I think this is an inappropriate and – forgive me for saying so – desperate attempt to downsize the trolling that takes place on this admittedly vulnerable website.
You aren’t going to destroy spam and trolling simply by generalizing everyone and punishing everyone equally thanks to a select few idiots who abuse this website; that’s the same principle as being in school when one clown gets in trouble and the whole class gets put into detention.
You, the Yahoo! Answers staff team, have now merged the benefits of users who are of level 4 through level 7; while you’re at it, why don’t you just make level 4 the highest level you are able to obtain? Unlimited answers and questions were the best and – on being able to do it once reaching the required level – gave a great feeling of accomplishment. That’s all been taken away, and I can only see it causing more damage than good.
People will now simply create multiple accounts in order to answer and ask more… your new system will do nothing but the opposite of what you want it to do. I am being deadly serious when I say: Bring back the old system. There was nothing wrong with the way the site was run; don’t fix what isn’t broken.
Personally, I think you should have a way to prevent people who obviously aren’t doctors telling people to take such-and-such a medication w/out ever having seen the patient.
I’m a Paramedic, and an Emergency Physician verified what I already know, that a board certified doctor DOESN’T prescribe medications across a modem.
But in the health category people do that so much it’s positively frightening to a TRUE health care professional.
I tell the questioners not to do it, but most of them just trust any advice given by someone calling themselves a doctor. And most won’t listen to me.
At last a stop to the point gamers getting over 20,000 a week, thanks Y?A at last you`ve done something positive,,
Under your new rule, what is the reward or advantage for progressing beyond Level 4?
As someone above points out, the “abusive” accounts are the “trolls” who created Level 1 accounts a few days ago.
Okay well that seems like a waste of time then. If a Level 5 user gets the same as a level 7 user then what would be the point of answering at all once you hit level 5? Something tells me that Y!A is going to be losing a ton of avid users who worked hard to answer questions correctly so they could be unlimited. Then you will just be left with the level 1-4 trolls who are the ones who answer in that manner in the 1st place. Most people who actually made to lvl 5-7 did so because they answered correctly and got significant amount of best answers. I don’t see why I should be punished because of other people. Yahoo! Answers has officially disappointed me for the last time. There should be further punishments upon the people who do answer in a bad manner (instead of when you try to report them you get an email saying it doesn’t go through if that person is a Top Contributor).
I am truly disappointed and I suppose I will have move on to another website where my answers are appreciated.
I don’t like the new limitations. This isn’t fair to the people that try to give helpful or valid answers. A few people give answers such as “I don’t know” or ” Thanks for the 2 points,” but I think most of them are lower levels trying to gain points quickly.
This seems like a bad move, to be honest. I think that it’s fine to have some sort of limit, but those who are one Level 7 should be able to answer and ask more questions than, say, someone on Level 5. There’s no real point in moving up the levels if you don’t differentiate between the different levels. I much preferred the system how it worked before.
Well, something has to be done because I’m sick of the stupid and rude responses. Maybe if Yahoo bans responders who give such responses (after 2 or 3) they’ll get tired of setting up new accounts and leave us alone.
Added to my previous comment
- If some of you would please take a look at the “dog” section you would see exactly what I mean. All the people who give good answers have vanished and we are left with trolls and people who answer stupidly. This limitation rule is dumb
Really?Really?
What about these hard working people that have level 7 accounts that were unlimited now they are just limited to 80 answers a day. That just stuns me & puts me into shock.
I believe yahoo answers honestly is very popular on the web but now i feel allot of people are going to leave exspecially the ones on levels 5, 6, & 7! I feel that the normal people will quit trying hard to level up & the trolls will come out more to.
I have been on yahoo answers for at least 4 years now. I thought the point of yahoo answ
I have been on yahoo answers for at least 4 years now. I thought the point of yahoo answers was to level up!
So whats the point?I agree to help people out but what else?
Points well made…
This is a pointless modification because someone who has reached level 5 and who wants to spam has always the possibily of giving lots of answers (80).
This is not a modification that increase the quality of this site.
there is no respect for people who use this site in a serious way. There are not only trolls or spammers , but also people who would like to give helpful answers.
It would be nice if the Level 7 statuses allowed us SOMETHING to distinguish ourselves from Levels 4-6. Save for the voting, level 7 is the same as 4-5, and 6 is exactly the same as 7.
Could you consider something more for the 7′s?
It seems to me that the low quality answers could easily be fixed by effective moderation, which would of course require 1) someone to actually review reported abuse, 2) that person to actually do something about it, and 3) real penalties for these types of abuse
People abusing Y!A has more to do with how much of a joke the moderation is than it does with people who had unlimited answer quotas, especially since the vast majority of people giving non-answers (at least that I’ve seen) are level 4 and below.
This change will probably mean that I contribute less, since most of my weekly contributions occur only over 1-2 days (thus now meaning 80-160 answers per week max). My average answer length is at least a paragraph, and thus far 73% of my answers are “best answer”.
if yahoo concentrated more on the spammers both business users and multiple posting of teh same question users instead of targeting the better users they would be doing more good
pointless restrictions rather than actually making the site better
very disappointed yahoo
I see that people level 4 to 7 really don’t gain any extra abilities.
what’s the point of leveling up if you don’t get to answer more, etc?
why even bother to get points if you don’t gain anything after a certain level?
How is that a positive change? People will still post trollery and dismissive answers to questions they don’t like. All it will really do is cut down the activity and give another reason to find or make another Q&A site.
“Positive change”? Please. This is ridiculous. People who spam rarely even get to level 2 or 3. People report them. Ditto for people who give non-answers. It’s crazy that people with 25,000+ points now have no more rights than people with 2500.
I’ve been using Y!A faithfully for over 15 years! There are times when I take a break, then I come back. What saddens me is not this limitation on answers, etc. because I’m already at level 6 – though I am trying to move up and would love to reach Top Contributor status just once! – I’m sadden at the vast decline of Y!A in reference to questions. There are questions that are seriously and obviously fakes. They are posted by Trolls – for what purpose I don’t know, and seem to be reposted several times through the day/week. I’ve now gotten to the place where I can spot a fake question – some are obvious like “I love my ex but I want to marry my wife, can I?” (I mainly go to Marriage & Divorce). Then there are others that sound real in their title, then you open it and it’s hogwash or something sexually offensive or just stupid jabber. Can’t you do something about that? These fake posts are published by accounts that were made the same day – I’ve started checking their history before I bother to answer – and should be obvious to the community leaders that they are fakes. Can’t you trace IP addresses and block these people! It wouldn’t be so bad if they actually gave BEST ANSWER points, but it’s a waste of time answer, sincerely, a post you know is fake! So the frustation can sometimes come out as “Thanks for the two points”.
Instead of punishing long-time users, I think you should find a way to target and stop the phising, trolling and abuse.
Actually I would like to see a crackdown on level 1 users that joined today and have a series of obvious hate questions or just general hate period. They obviously opened an alternate account and don’t expect to last long.
There should be a more of a defferance between levels 5,6,and 7 and if you want to increase the quality of this site it should cost more to ask a question and the penalty for breaking the rule should go up
I see they’ve doubled up on the voting questions from 200 to 400.
I guess they want Level 7 clients to do less answering and more voting.
There’s thousands of questions waiting to be voted on for best answer going back several years in many of the forums (politics especially).
Perhaps as an encouragement, give out more points than the single point to reduce the backlog.
All you’re doing here is saying “we’re really careless about who we let get to level 7″.
You should fix that, not punish everyone.
Great that spam is being limited. But I would have preferred algorithms that analyze usage to flat limits. Yahoo should be able to detect if a user is pasting “I don’t know”. Or if a user is answering multiple questions in 3 seconds each.
I am not concerned about points for answers, what you
ought to be tackling is stupid, inane and puerile
questions. Questions such as What do I do with a boner? Have no place here or anywhere.
The site is deteriorating into chaos through lack of
there being any moderators, or so it seems. Some
questions are racist, pornographic or downright trolling.
This is another way Y!A is trying to get people to go off this site. This thing is insane.
Instead of this they should take off the trolls, and leave everything else the same.
I am not opposed to the changes you have made, but I do wonder what the criteria is on becoming a top contributor? I remember being in that position once in the five years I have been contributing. Most of the time I stay within two categories. Just saying…
The less time I spend here, the less ads I see, the less money Yahoo! makes…
And you’re going to see the spammers just create more accounts to post their bullshit on, you’ve only succeeded in punishing legitimate Y!Answer users…
That’s ridiculously unfair. There are people on here who will give very low quality answers no matter what the question or answer limit is. Have fun losing all of your business.
absolutely pointless, and does nothing but punish the innocent
spammers rarely get past level 2
Please. PLEASE don’t do this, Y!A. I love this website, and you’ve pretty much eliminated the purpose of levels now. If you are trying to drive people away, this is the way to do so. Yes, I’ve been suspended a few times, but the only thing that keeps me answering is knowing that I can help. 80 questions a day is simply not enough sometimes.
when i reach 5, 6, or 7 on here i can’t use the unlimited questions, comments, or answer giving because people have taken advantage of it. i don’t think that’s fair.
Absolutely stupid. All of us at levels 5 and onwards are now tarred with the same brush just because of a few people who are playing the system. A lot of us have worked very hard to get to this stage, and now you punish us with this. Well, thank you very much. I would ask you reverse this frankly ludicrous decision or risk losing a lot of your (very valued) contributors.
There’s no reward now for those of us who actually help. What you should be doing instead of punishing the ones who are helping, is punishing the ones who don’t. This PROVES your community moderation system doesn’t work – or there’d be no need for you to take action like this. And it sucks.
It is virtually impossible to get to level 7 without a decent proportion of best answers even accounting for spammers. Looking at the comment this move has alienated a lot of the higher users who almost by definition give the best answers (less the mysterious Top Contributor).
The source of a lot of trolling is from abuse of the voting system and best answer – where the questioner gives themselves or their mate best answer without giving a proper answer and vague questions.
It’s understandable that Y!A want to cut abuse of the system but the only way you’re ever going to achieve that is by having more moderation-hours. If you are short then promote some of the more knowledgeable/trustworthy posters to either moderate globally or over a subset of categories.
Trolling has already virtually confined my activity to the Science section whereby there is one correct answer.
[...] an active product, at least judging by today’s announcement of changes to its level system (changes that its most active users won’t like, [...]
This is the biggest crock of you-know-what I’ve ever heard. This site is just getting crappier and crappier.
These limitations, like the new restrictions on reporting and getting reported, aren’t going to do squat to weed out the trolls and flamers. Nor will be punishing people who give one-word answers, as sometimes the only answer needed is “yes” or “no”.
If you want to get rid of the level 1 trolls and the people who abuse the system with points gaming or breaking the community guidelines, then DO YOUR JOB and moderate the boards.
If someone has a habit of trolling, then block their IP and ban them from YA altogether. Look for certain screennames! You have no idea how many screenname variations I have seen in R&S ALONE that are the same trolls and troublemakers coming back on new accounts over and over again.
And if someone gets reported, LOOK AT THE COMPLAINT! Some people DO report people just to get them into trouble because they don’t like what they’re saying. It’s made ME afraid to report some rather offensive and racist people because I don’t care to lose my hard earned points when nobody bothers to read the complaint or someone thinks I’M picking a fight with someone.
Look at what they’re saying, then look at the community guidelines. Has anything been broken? If so, then punish the person being complained about. If not, then give a warning to the reporter causing trouble, then ban them entirely afterwards.
Between the report criterias and this new b.s. about limitations(which I was VERY happy to be rid of when I hit level 5!), you guys are doing a piss poor job of handling the problem.
At this point, *I* could probably handle the problem better than you by doing my job like YOU should be doing.
This really seems like Yahoo is once again valiantly attacking a problem by punishing its most loyal users.
When Yahoo Chat rooms became a concern because private rooms were being created that could be used by certain users for unsavory activites, Yahoo stepped up and made sure that we could *all* see the offensive clods and jerks, by forcing them into the public rooms. Yahoo Chat became a desert filled with non-English-writing, giant-font- screaming idiots. It never recovered.
And now Yahoo decides to fight the spam and obnoxious posts of YA by… punishing those that have used it the most. Don’t consider setting up any sort of community monitoring/moderation (say, by setting up a criteria for (say) Top Contributors) to be able to act as moderators within their own field. No…
Rather, let us be subject to an arbitrary limit that makes every actor the same – ”equally” punishing the valid user that answers questions, gets ‘Top Answer’ responses 25%, 50%, 70% of the time and the spam-master who will be so bewildered on how, oh HOW he can possibly manage to unload buckets of dreck on the public with a limit of -20- or -40- or -80- questions, or answers… Because we all know just how the spammers abide by the 1-ID-per-person rules…. So that wouldn’t be any sort of concern, no would it?
Bah. And I was really liking YA.
Guess there’s nothing so fixed that it can’t be broken in its ‘improvement’.
There is no longer a difference between level 6 and 7 and barely any difference between 5 and 6/7. So there is no reward for higher level points.
Spammers are universally people who are 100 points. So you are going after the wrong people.
I am glad that yahoo is doing something to cut down on spam and trolling but I don’t think this was quite the right move. Level 5 to level 7 is meant to be a little more free from limitations. When we are on level 1 to level 4 the limitations are a little annyoing and its fun trying to level up because we all want to experiance no limitations that come with the higer levels. But now that the higer levels have limitations Im afraid level 6 and level 7 lose the freedom of no limitations. If you are going to put limitations on each level should have differant limitations not the same for all. I just wish other users would of realised what a great service this is and not have missued it. Now everyone is being puished for others mistakes.
OUCHY!!! As a level 7 member of Yahoo! Answers I truly cannot and do not like these limitations. I sometimes answer over 100 questions daily. I am disabled and Yahoo! Answers is my home away from home, so to speak. I’d rather see you penalize those who do abuse the privileges of this site by paying much more attention to those questions and answers that do not toe the mark, as it were.
That’s not fair. >; I spent many hours working towards my level six so I could answer unlimited questions.
I think that really sucks & is totally unfair!!!!!!!!
Now The Asian guy,Aunt Katie,aint going to make over 11k points anymore. !! You guys rock !
Love this site. 80 is indeed great !!!! AWESOME dear Y!A keep going !
This is a bad move, this doesn’t stop the idiots from posting idk or cool story bro answers, that is already against guidelines, as is spam, this is yahoo listening to the minority who hit the suggestion boards to make it their paradise, most because they don’t know how to parent, the rest because their parents didn’t
If you want to “vote” for something, vote for the questions that have been parked in voting for MONTHS in tiebreaker mode. I always strive to give the best answer only to have it go to voting. Then some clown who said “Google it” gets the Best Answer. I agree with peetri, many people give low quality answers. Very unfair. I’m quickly approaching level 5 too.
If you want to “protect” us from spam, then move quickly to delete or penalize the spammers. I repeated report the tea spammer found in China travel section only to see an obvious spam go to voting!! REPEATEDLY!
Here, Here! This is a great idea! Keep up the great work Yamster!
Do real people make the decisions? Or are, as with many things these days, made by automatic, computer driven responses? Seems that humor, especially “dry humor” is verboten?
What? An answer limit for level 7? Boo! This sucks.
Wow… At least add more levels if this move is made…
Level 6 and 7 should have a higher number of answers like 100 or something, because I like looking forward to being able to answer more questions on my next level. I might as well just stay on level 4 now rather than trying to get to level 7.
Sounds like Y!A staff didn’t really think this one out… This will offend the good users without effecting the trolls and spammers at all.
The obvious answer is to hire more moderators. You could try having a minimum of 2 people per category on shift 24/7, maybe more for the more popular categories. It might cost money, but if you don’t do it, some other site WILL and we’ll all go there instead… and then how will your advertisers pay you? Get your act together before it’s too late Y!A.
Even idiots know how to get around this ‘limitation’ that is intended to control trolling and spamming – open multiple accounts per day. Trolls and spammers don’t care about points and levels because they realize they’ll get booted soon anyway, only the good users care about reaching high levels. So a spammer can open 10 accounts per day and get their product out 2000 times per day. This doesn’t limit them at all, it’s a minor inconvenience if anything, but not enough of an inconvenience to stop them. The fact that Y!A staff doesn’t know this is astounding, I mean really, how is it that the users know more about this than the staff?
The “Thanks for the 2 points” and “i don’t know” answerers are mostly level 1 answerers, and this behavior from answerers usually stops at level 3, rarely level 4. You’ve punished the answerers who aren’t doing this, which are answerers level 5-7.
Voting is more of a chore than a privelege. No one cares that much to vote. Usually people only vote on their own questions and answers. The interest fades when you haven’t actually participated in the question or answer. You’d have to pay me to vote on 400 questions in a day. I wouldn’t normally vote on more than 3 in one day that I hadn’t participated in myself. If you have a problem with too many questions with no best answer, then do the right thing and hire people, and if you can’t do that, then at least reward us more for voting instead of acting like it’s some sort of privilege that you can aspire to once you reach level 6. LOL just the sound of that made me laugh!
Maybe consider after reaching level 7 the answerers would be given the opportunity to be a moderator. A staff member would review their questions and answers to decide whether they were worthy, and then the answerer would receive the invite.
1. Solves your problem with trolls and spammers.
2. Solves your problem about hiring moderators.
3. Solves the problem about offending, and therefore losing, your best answerers.
See? All it took was about 10 minutes of thinking to solve your problem. You should pay me for being your business consultant. Not like you would…
…At least give me best answer!!! hahaha j/k
I wonder if Yahoo! is even reading these comments. Do they see how displeased the vast majority is about this new rule?
The motivation behind the idea is good, to get rid of trolls and spammers, but the idea itself is TERRIBLE. You’re targeting the wrong group of people. Anyone who posts “2 points”, or “cool story bro” gets reported after a while, and eventually gets their account suspended.
Those kind never actually make it up to level 5, 6, or 7. What you need is closer monitering on the lower levels, not harsher enforcements on the loyal Y!Aers who have made it up to these levels. It used to feel like an achievement, but what exactly is it worth now?
I really hope that Yahoo goes through these comments, and realise how flawed the new limits are..
Why not try finding the “Thanks for the 2 points”, and ‘I don’t know” responses, and dealing with those users?
I reached level 7 years ago, and have never seen the usefulness of the points system anyway.
Since my post seems to have been deleted, I’ll say it again. You’re unfairly tarring all of us with the same brush. Some of us worked damn hard to get to where we are, and we do what we do very well. All you’re doing is punishing everyone because others can’t behave.
This PROVES that your community moderation system simply isn’t working – if it was, you’d be able to weed out the idiots and trolls instead of resorting to measures like this, which could and probably will, make you lose very valued contributors.
Some people will still post 80 troll comments… fortunately these are the people with no life. Hopefully trolls, who have a life, will answer seriously and actually be helpful.
After so many years here I feel just plain unwelcome.
This isn’t the way to do things, an empty answer just gets passed over by the reader, those points aren’t money you know they are unimportant. Being limited this way means I just won’t bother to come back during the day.
Why don’t you just listen to the complaints made about users who abuse the system?
Seriously? Talk about a sad attempt to make up for the trolling that constantly occurs on this site. Why not get your moderators to actually pay attention?
While you are at it, up the points penalty for non-answers. People who get “IDK” may take the time to report them.
Man what the heck is with this crap i started on here to answer questions with the best knowledge i had on a given subject and to get to be a higher level to give advice to as many people as i want. If you’re going to take away the unlimited part Seriously MAKE Questions Answers and Comments go up each level unless you want to see a very boring not often used site because that is what yahoo answers will quickly become.
I’d sure like to know who is signing off on these recent non-sensical “changes”. This is just putting a band-aid on a hemorrhage, and I still say the biggest problem is the way abuse reports are handled.
I’m a Level 7 who started posting in a new section a month or so ago, and it was a trainwreck. I tried to help clean it up with a series of abuse reports for clearcut abuse (?s about TCs in the section, spam questions, solicitation, etc). Not ONE question disappeared. Find a way to limit those who can report abuse and then take those reports more seriously. I gave up and haven’t gone back to that section. And this is your loss, not mine.
I’m indifferent to the changes because it won’t affect my usage at all.
It is disturbing that this is being pitched as fighting spam. There are at least a dozen other changes that would be far more effective.
How about a commitment to process the Spam Battle Thread on a daily basis?
how about make all level 6 and 7 top contributors? None of this subject specific for 3 categories bull! Or at least have our level listed when we answer a question.
thanks,
Jack of all trades, master of several.
Yahoo! Answers should automatically reject abusive answers such as “I don’t know” and “Thanks for the 2 points.” You won’t be able to filter out all of them, but at least you can reject the totally obvious ones.
I’ve read the other comments on this subject.
I agree whole-heartedly with the people who would much rather see the spammers, trolls and abusers receive more punishment.
People who actually READ the questions asked, then give LEGITIMATE, well-thought-out answers, should not be the ones who are limited. This seems unfair to those who play by the rules! (on any level)
There should be more moderators to deal with the abusers in a more timely fashion!
If this change reduces inappropriate answering, it is equally likely that it will increase inappropriate voting.
I appreciate that you’re trying to fix things, Yahoo, but I don’t think this is an effective way to curb spam and unhelpful answers because:
1. It doesn’t make sense to impose these limits on the high-level users when most of the spam and unhelpful posts seem to come from low-level users.
2. The new limits are not going to stop people from making low-quality posts. A lot of users are still going to spam regardless.
I think that if you really want to improve the quality of the site, you should impose harder punishments on trolls and other rule breakers and do something about your reporting system. I’ve seen way too many innocent questions and answers get deleted every day because of reporter trolls.
Now onto the users who abuse the system by opening multiple accounts
Great move, but they need to do more to eliminate multiple accounts to limit political trolling.
I don’t like that level 4 through 7 allows the same amount of answers. The only difference is the number of votes. I don’t use this site to vote. I use it to answer.
I think the new limits are fine. It makes the higher levels on Yahoo Answers a more even playing field. I suspect that over time these limits may change again, but this gives the whole site some time to settle down and to bring things back more to the way they used to be a few years ago. The spamming and trolling have gotten way out of hand, and there are a few situations going on that this will take care of. Give it time, people, and let things settle down. I am one of the people who has often answered more than 100 questions in a day and I applaud the changes. Something needed to be done, and this will help in the long term. Maybe this is an example of short term pain for long term gain.
I’m fine with these changes, but Y!A needs to work on punishing those spammers that we report. Apparently I am no longer “trusted” so even if I report a question as illegal, it is not deleted. It seems pointless to report spammers and pervs if you are not going to do anything about them.
Not pleased at all. It takes a long time to reach Level 7 under the old system. I’ve done it twice because of accounts being “suspended”. Other than the sense of accomplishment, the points are becoming even more meaningless than there were before. Why not just get rid of them entirely? It would serve the same purpose. If you want to use points to increase the helpfulness of answers, why not reward THUMBS UP with points, while taking away points for THUMBS DOWN? Best Answers could be 25 points. Just drop the points for every answer
thanks Yamster as always. you always do great.
“If you’re hitting the limits, we suggest that you be more selective and focus on those questions/answers you have more to share about.”
Or we could just make extra accounts using other free email addresses like the low levels that spam do. You seriously think this will stop Y!A spam when most of it’s done by level ones? I doubt it.
I cannot help but wonder why it took so long to implement a suggestion which has been around for years. No matter how long it took, this is a step in the right direction. Thank you.
I’ve been at Level 7 Top Contributor for some time now. I wasn’t aware there was a limit on the number of answers. I don’t think I answer more than a dozen or so questions per day.
I will admit to occasionally answering with a “thanks for the points”, but that’s generally to a question that was pretty stupid in the first place. You guys know what I mean. I figure, if they can’t be bothered to muster up the brain power to formulate a sensible question, why should I muster up a sensible answer?
But now I have a “limit” — higher than what I normally need, but what the heck. We’ll see how it works out.
In the meantime, I agree with the folks who say there needs to be ways to kick off the obvious trolls and shameless self-promoting spammers. Maybe a Level 7 poster should have a non-moderated “kill” switch that automatically nukes any Level 1 poster that was started less than a week ago for the obvious purposes of spamming? Let the moderators use their time to occasionally check on us to make sure we don’t abuse our power, and if we do, kick us down to level 6 or something.
this move will do nothing to deter the trolls and
spammers. they will only open a new account once they reach their daily limit. they already do this now.
most spammers and trolls aren’t up to level 6 or 7 anyway. Instead you should hire some real moderators to weed out these types of posts. they’ll eventually quit if they’re posts get deleted all the time.
So give level 7s some kind of moderating abilities. they can actually pull a certain number of violation posts a day, say 7, without having to report it to Yahoo.
I’m completely against this. Ok sure it will stop spammers but it’s not going to stop people from posting non answers. If they must put a limit on lvl 5+ why not make it 25 questions and 100 answers for 5, 30 questions and 120 answers for 6, 30 questions and 140 answers for 7 and keep the previous vote limit (I myself don’t ask or answer that may questions but others might). It’s unfair to punish those who answer questions to help people. The only things they’re going to is make people create multiple accounts and force decent users to leave. Yahoo please reconsider the upper level limits.
Why should the people that are Level 7 with 25,000 points be treated the same as I am with over 140,000 points?
I truly believe that I help many people daily with my quality answers. It takes dedication to reach 140,000 points and those people with >100,000 should remain unlimited. We are not the spammers.
My last level 7 was banned. For what reason I can’t fathom. I was a top contributor several times, and always published high quality answers. Now, the new account I’ve made (level 4) has the same power as the level 7 I had. Probably better I was banned….
I don’t agree with levels being almost identical at the top.
The widespread use of multiple IDs to troll,are far more worthy of your attention.
So a level 4 person is on the same as me, a level 7? After I have decidated almost 5 years of my life to helping people on this site .. what an insult.
Not fair at all.
You shouldn’t be punishing your most valuable contributers.
Yes, trolls are annoying, but I have never seen a troll who is past level 2.
Disgraceful move. I’ve no idea if I will reach my maximum answers of 80 per day, if I do I will leave Yahoo Answers and join the other Q&A site where there are no limits for top users.
If you are taking away unlimited questions and answers, the least you could do is increase the amount of questions and answers being asked and answered by the higher levels.
Otherwise why have higher levels at all? Whats the point?
Yahoo Answers Team needs to monitor the site
That kind renders “levels” pointless, no? Level 4 through level 7 all have the same privileges, so why bother having 7 levels?
Most spammers never make it to level 4 anyway.
If you want to combat spam, you ought to simply delete all Yahoo accounts, including Yahoo email, in the case of anyone receiving 5 or more “spam” abuse reports.
Frankly, considering the fact that your most faithful answerers gain absolutely zilch from Yahoo, but Yahoo gains from their participation, punishing them may rub some of them the wrong way. You should offer some better rewards to your regulars.
And what will stop multiple accounts from flooding the comments sections in R/S, a forum rampant with abuse? One group of users routinely harass others with their multiple accounts to report and swamp comment sections.
This is really dumb. How about actually stopping the spammers instead of this?
This makes me so angry that I may just stop using Y!A altogether. It unfairly punishes higher level users (who, as far as I can tell, are NOT the problem–it’s the Level 1 trolls who ARE). I mean, 80 answers? I don’t think I ever really come near that much, but I’m sure there are plenty of people who are on here enough to come up against that limit, and that’s just not fair.
This is a terrible idea, and especially with the edit counting as an answer, if you say you want to increase the quality of the answers, why do you count edits as an answer? I think this is more to appease a few, so punish the many for both the actions, and the wishes of a few. If you wanted to truly clean it up, reducing the number of questions would help somewhat, or if you wanted to put limits, make them at least continue, 100 for 5 130 for 6, continue 7 at unlimited, and make the violations policy CLEAR, given warnings in advance of suspensions may make some think before posting drivel. This across the board punishment of all for the few is a bad policy. Charging an answer for an edit is and always has been a bad idea.
Stupid new rule.
Now there’s no difference between a Level 4 and a Level 7.
This new limit won’t increase the quality of posts. People will continue to answer with “I don’t know”. and find ways around this rule (with multiple accounts, etc.)
The only people who are really being hurt by this rule are the ones who DO give a lot of helpful answers, as their answering capacity is now seriously diminished. BAD MOVE.
I would hope we could stop the spam and point-gaming through community moderation, weeding out the users who are abusing the site before they become high-level. This does not seem fair to those who have worked hard to get unlimited Q&A and are not misusing the site,
This is not fair to those of us who give good answers. Regardless of level, answers like “I don’t know”, “Why don’t you google it?” deserve to be removed and the person suspended for a couple of days.
I especially think edits should not count as answers – I edit mine extensively. This is not another answer, it is an improvement on an extant answer.
It really sticks in my craw that you’ll limit my ability to answer but did not remove an obvious attempt at point gaming in which all the answerer said was “ya” on two different questions. She’d asked a question (later deleted) and I guess she wanted to offset her point cost.
Good going Yahoo! – punish the people who make your site great. No wonder you’re losing money.
Yahoo…you disappoint me. This is a slap in the face. Right when I start liking Yahoo, Yahoo just pushes me miles away. You have lost my respect. Also, limiting isn’t going to stop anything. The change was pointless and unfair.
Would someone who made it all the way to level 5, 6, or 7 have made it by giving non-answers?
This is totally ridiculous and unnecessary. Not only am I a HR Director frequently answering employment related questions, I have lived through five decade and so have considerable experience of life generally.
As far as I am aware, it is mostly QUESTIONS that are spam, not answers. There is already a Report facility but you are punishing regular users over something the Moderating Team should be watching out for themselves..
This bizarre initiative makes Yahoo! Answers a big waste of time for experienced users
Really quick comment here but why not award those that report spammers correctly with points…this is likely to decrease spammers in a positive way quickly too without damaging those on the higher levels..please consider this yahoo.
I know you usually rely on a repeated member reporting correctly and making them have a higher impact and so this idea may mean that yahoo employees have to actually make sure the question is spam, but i think this would be a good idea…if that got out of hand you could always deduct points for reporting incorrectly, but i can see this all going a bit far and people reporting just for the sake of it, maybe consider it.
This comment was made with me writing at 3:50 am and not thinking too straight lol
I guess at least it might stop obvious cheaters who are getting 100,000 pts a month on here, 95% best answer, and who I have never even seen an answer from. Btw, how do you report people like that? YA needs to get rid of them. Like this one. 500,000 this year already, 56,000 pts for the week
This decision is in line with the general overall decline in the quality of Yahoo over the past coupe of years.
In accordance with many of the responses above from high level producers, in historical fashion you have changed the wrong things and the move was not thought through. Why would you punish your primary quality contributers and let the Trolls and one day wonders carry on? This is another “New Coke” idea.
Kind of real dopey having a 6 and a 7 when they make no difference.
As usual YA!s answer to a problem is a sweeping useless gesture that not only doesn’t solve the problem, but also punishes the good contributors. It’s a double slap in the face to those of us who have unfairly been penalized. Here’s what you do.
1. Have a system where an actual human checks the reported questions and not just an automated system than goes oh gee two people decided they didn’t like an answer so it must be bad.
2. Give every newbie (level 1 user) a trial period of 30 days where their questions and answers are moderated.
3. If a question with exactly the same wording shows up more than 3 times in a 6 hour period, the questioner will be notified they need to remove all but 1 instance.
I remembered that when i first joined, i couldn’t wait to be at level 7 because i didn’t like the limits the lower level had. THIS WAS ALMOST 6 YEARS AGO. Now, my 6 years of putting forth quality, good, researched answers to questions that I at least have some knowledge about is being thrown away by these new limits.
I know that there are some high level users that spam or post these garbage, low quality answers that don’t even attempt to answer the question, but this new change isn’t the best way to get them. They can still behave the same way, but within 80 questions. The good users are the losers, with this change.
well yamster, looks like your post is getting more thumbs down than up. I am level 6 and don’t think this affects me one bit. If I am on the internet long enough to fill the quota, its time to go outside and play for a while.
BTW, what is the difference between an answer and a comment?
Does nothing about abuser who use multiple accounts. Which is the REAL problem. In every section with a problem.
Seriously? how could one person give 80 answers in 1 day. good grief! how many hours are you on here? I’m at level 6, most of my points gained in almost 2 years of unemployment. I’ve never answered more than 25 a day.
This a completely unfair non fix, I do sort of agree with the questions limit, if anything lower levels should get less, these are the biggest abusers of the asking problem, and spammers seldom ever get past 1, 2 at the most. This is obviously a plan by the few to make their report job easier, not a real attempt to clean up the site. If you really wanted quality answers, why would you sharge an answer to an edit, possibly the person answering came across new knowledge as well, ask any supervisor, who had to look into an answer for their employee, you learn by answering as well sometimes, these limits, especially with that feature will NOT enhance the quality of this site.
You have GOT to be kidding, all because of “I dont know” and “thanks for the two points”answers? And cant you just automatically delete the spammers instead of punishing everyone for that too? Thats just incredibally stupid Yahoo, please take this rule away and I wasnt one to complain till now.
This doesn’t affect me at all I answer maybe 10 questions a week and I haven’t asked any questions in months.
I say.
Good move!!!!!!
In my opinion, you are on the wrong path, you have always been on the wrong path. this whole site have many flaws. I just want to be honest. have you searched for dumb questions yahoo answers, and troll yahoo answers? a lot of results. you don’t find much about stackoverflow et.al why? because stackoverflow designed in professional way meant to serve real questions and answers and meant for building trust and community-self policing. it works great. perhaps you should study their way and develop your own based on that.
Quit this random temporary decisions. limits are not the problem. people going to open new accounts and post spam . only what you do by this is punish the honest posters. Turn the site around into self-moderated community. remove the games and “cute” stuff. it’s useless for a professional site. your site looks like a child play. hence it attracts all the point-gamers, trolls. Yamster?, avatars?, thumb down/up wars?, points with no much meaning?, now you are making those points even more meaningless.
Perhaps the reason that Yahoo is in trouble because the people in charge is not thinking outside the box, is not learning from other sites experience, rather just copying simple ideas from others. Google made answers, yahoo created one. but yahoo failed to look what made google answers a success. Yahoo didn’t look what made stackoverflow a success. same with yahoo videos and several other services.
You might never read this. but at least I just tried.
And I agree that levels 5, 6, 7 should have less answer limits as you go at least or else theres nothing to look forward to past level 4..
Oh and btw I can gurantee you this wont stop people who just want to spam and give bad answers from doing their job and spammers dont normally make it past level 1 anyway so imposing an answer limit on all users is not going to solve the problem but you will piss more people off..just seems like a really lazy and wishy washy move.
Seems a little illogical to me; what exactly is the benefit to being over level 4? More votes? At the very least, limit them to 80/100/120/140 for levels 4/5/6/7. Make people feel like they’re earning SOMETHING.
“But we are also aware of people taking advantage of the unrestricted limits to spam and publish low quality answers…”
It’s the low levels that point game like that. The higher levels have no need to. You have it tail backwards, guys.
This is very unfair, I can agree with those who says it punish the people who dedicate there time to answer questions properly. This is a wrong move.
that’s stupid
What cheeses me off is all of the idiots that create an account just to log in and ask for someone to do their homework for them. They make absolutely 0 effort in the Program and Design forum and yet if you suggest that they make some effort and come back and ask questions about things that stumped them, then you get deleted.
Posting the specifications for your programming problem and expecting someone to write the code for you is akin to the idiots posting stupid questions in the other forums…did I say idiots, I meant trolls.
So, high level users are now restricted, but I can still read what bra size a 12 yo should get, or whether an 11yo should have sex, or where I can get a call girl in India, how to remove parental locks from a 12 yo’s PS3, or a 10yo asking about a blue vein IN the cheek!
Whatever you do, DO NOT post a link to any internal Y!A page that provides an answer as you will be reported.
And now I can answer as many questions as a level 4 user, awesome. Really Yahoo? Did you honestly think this was gonna fix anything? All it does it punish daily users, and does nothing to the spam users that post here daily. All they do is make a new account, it does not affect them whatsoever. The only people this affects are regular everyday users, and the regular users are not trolls!!
Okay, this is not good, I always wanted to answer many questions, unlimeted. I am not a spammer, Im just a helpful person thats all. So please yahoo answers dont change it.
Dear Yahoo Team,
I think you have made a serious mistake. How do you think restricting 5,6,7 level users solve the abuse problem? The abusers accounts never survive to reach that level – they just keep creating new ones – you solved nothing but punished those of us who enjoy Y!A very much and earned the unlimited privileges. You might as well remove the levels from Y!A because it means nothing now – the abuse from a handful of users will continue no matter what you do and you should know this by now – please reverse this horrible decision.
Thanks for ruining my entertainment.
I have never commented on one of these before, but now feel the need.
Y!A Team, I’d say that 90%+ of the people who are level 5 and up are NOT trolls/spammers, they’re people who have worked to get that far. You’re punishing people who didn’t do anything wrong.
I’m chronically ill and some days when I’m too sick to go out, I like to sit on Y!A and answer questions. It’s kind of fun to work towards having unlimited answers.
The way to stop trolls/spammers isn’t to limit how many posts people can make. You need moderators, reliable people who can browse the forums and delete the troll/spam answers, and people who will actually review reported questions/answers.
I know a lot of responsible people, myself as one, would happily volunteer to help moderate forums. Y!A users want the spam to stop, and would be willing to help.
This is not much unlike punishing the whole class when the person who put the tack on teacher’s chair does not admit it. And it certainly won’t solve any problems.
Definitely NOT a good move.
Hate it… If they want to stop trolls and spammers, than STOP TROLLS AND SPAMMERS instead of putting limits on everyone…
Don’t punish us all because some of us don’t follow the rules…
And the trolls and spammers will just make more accounts so they can keep trolling and spamming…
This only hurts people who follow the rules…
Way to ruin Y!A yet again!
The ones who should be punished are the trolls and spammers. If the answers get more than 2 or 3 thumbs down, then they should not be getting the 2 points (let the community decide).
I am around 37,000 and wish there were tiny incentives about moving up the levels. All in all this is still a really good idea. If people would ALL report chat and in wrong category questions, that would vastly improve. Behind he scenes trusted reporters to flag down bad questions (some of us don’t want points, just a quality site) would be a team effort and REPORT chat, REPORT violating questions. That alone would work.
Instead of negative feedback I will attempt a solution: Bring back the old level system with certain modifications. Increase the number of levels to 10 and modify the points required per level. Give a fair increase per level, and at certain levels start adding “unlimited” in each category until level 10 which obviously should have the most freedom. There is a good reason I am suggesting to increase the maximum level. What you can do is create a system of reporting posts which require a certain amount of points for automatic removal… for example a level 1 only needs 10 points against that post for automatic removal, at level 2 they need 20 points and so on. >>The level of the person determines points against. For example, a level 10 reporting a level 1 will be an automatic post removal. Alternatively 2 level 5s. After 5 post removals you get a warning and a 1 day ban. 5 more and you are permanently banned. Active reporters can receive a badge. False claims can easily be reviewed. You can not start reporting until a certain level.
This change is hard to swallow to say the least, a warning perhaps might have better prepared the masses for such a drastic change. But hey I doubt Yahoo gives a crap about the people who drive their advertisements. I’m not saying the limitations are a bad idea, but increase them for higher levels! I’ve run into the limitation 2 days in a row now! And it’s not because I don’t put thought into every answer I give, it’s because I like to do so, and I do it quickly. This change is unwelcome to say the least, and after reading the comments on this post it seems I am not the only one. If Yahoo truly wants to keep it’s users on then I suggest they make changes. Because If there is no point in being a level 7 then why would we stay?
this is unfair!!. how many trolls do you actually see past level 4? …
i bet 90% of the trolls are from level 1 to 3….. why punish levels 4 to 7? … rarely do trolls make it past level 3 -____-
There’s this person who has been trolling on the Classical forum–I’ve actually reported him for violating YA guidelines–along with dozens of people who keep asking the same questions over and over and over again. If you could cut down repetition by referring people to earlier answers, and really start clamping down on people who misuse the site, that would be a far better way to go. Do we really need kids under 13 who aren’t even supposed to be on Yahoo giving career advice to another child? I could certainly trim up some of my answers, but I spend a lot of time actually looking up information to back up what I say or to give additional details where needed.
That looks fne I believe…
Before you delete my comment like you ALWAYS do (every time I have ever commented on the blog ever without exception period, which is why I sound bitter) let me ask this…
WHEN are you going to deal with the point gaming hacks around here? The people that post non-relevant or poor answers and then vote for themselves. By the hundreds maybe thousands per day? I know of several accounts that get up to 40,000 points a week with a 95+% best answer rating. What about them?! I notify you people repeatedly and you go “they are not misusing the system” or some BS like that. Voting best answers for themselves 3,000 times a week is DEFINITLEY abusing the system. Those accounts should be taken down.
I don’t mind people voting for themselves if they make a good or relavant answer as long as they don’t overdue it and would vote for other that have BETTER answers than they do. Because we all have voted for ourselves before. But the flagrant abuse by some users needs to be dealt with.
I don’t see the point of having levels 5, 6 & 7 when the only difference is 200 votes vs 400 votes per day. With NO difference what so ever between level 6 & 7.
what is the point? Levels 6 & 7 are NO different what so ever.
they could spread the levels further apart … that would prevent trolling.. it would give “real” users more of a challenge
level 1 100 – 1, 999 points
2 – 2,000 – 5,999
3 – 6,000, 10,999
5 – 11,000, 16,999
6, 17,000 – 23,999
7, 24,000 +
1 100 – 999
2, 1,000 – 2, 999
3, 3, 000 – 6, 999
4, 7,000 – 11,999
5, 12,000 – 17,999
6, 18,000 – 24,000
7, 24,000 + – unlimited answers
trolls don’t even make it past a couple thousand anyway..
Wow…I feel bad now. I recently just got up to level 4. I was proud of the increased benifits even though I knew I wouldn’t have the time to utilize them. I rarely give more than 3-9 answers any given day, but that’s because each answer I give takes a time…and effort. That’s why I get best answers. But now…I don’t have anything to really strive for, no more little jolly if I get an increase.
I think this will make fewer people give good answers now. They don’t have to work hard to get best answer if the points won’t help them any more.
As for me I just like helping people…the points don’t matter…but it still makes me feel good.
This change makes me feel a little less good. v.v
Don’t give unlimited…but at least make there be a difference in levels….who votes that much in one day anyway?
Terrible move, and won’t help at all in preventing spam. It will only make it harder to reach to level 6 for me. Thanks for nothing.
I do think level 7 users should only be allowed to answer the same number of questions as levels 4, 5 & 6 that is not fair. What is the sense in all those levels having the same answering ability? Surely level 4 should be on a par with level 2 & 3. Just level 7 should be allowed to answer 100 questions as that is the top acolade.
But spammers never make it to level 5 anyway?
Damn, just a few points of level 5 as well.
OK so i’m at level 5 now and I see no reason to continue working towards level 7. What next no more top contributors?
BTW there are way bigger flaws you guys should be working on. Like the spell check works right about half the time and I haven’t been able to upload a new profile pick in months and I can’t figure out how to contact you guys about it.
Bad move Y!A
In that case, why even have a level 7? It’s identical to level 6.
.
I’m surprised people make it past 80 answers.
All you’ve really done is eliminate Level 7, since it is now indistinguishable from Level 6. Once you hit 25,000 points, nothing changes. You shouldn’t even list a Level 7.
Of all the spam answers I have seen, none of them have been users with the higher levels.
This doesn’t solve the problem. Even if you flipped it, giving those with higher levels back their freedom of unlimited answers and giving level one’s less answers per day, it just means they’ll create even MORE accounts to make up for it.
Can’t you put a ban on certain IP addresses from making new accounts within a number of days, or hours as the case may be for some? Or at least do something not to punish those higher level users for something most of them have never done, and never even thought about doing.
Yahoo: We never met a problem we can’t make(or make worse).
There WAS no problem as the trolling crap didn’t tend to get to high levels. Then again if anyone really CARED about the abuse then they would look at abuse reports and look on the boards themselves sometimes. If people reported the “2 points” and “I don’t know” answers then they could go away. However most don’t really care about the crap answers, including Yahoo. This is just Yahoo trying to make a problem, or make it worse, in claiming they are fixing something.
Think my posts were deleted, so Ill try to state my opinion again. I really dont think this is going to help the spamming/bad answers issue, I can gurantee you people are still going to spam/troll regardless. I mean most spammers dont even make it past level 1 let alone to levels 5-7, so whats this levels 5-7 restrictions going to be to them? Seems that youre just punishing the more serious answerers (which if they made it to levels 5-7 they must not spend a good amount of their time trolling) and leaving the real trolls alone. Which in the end I would think will drive out the higher level better answers and just leave you with the trolls. And Im still with this is a rather lazy wishy washy move.
And Serg dont think that would be a good idea, actually I know it wont. Because you have to think of the people who target others with the thumbs down function and even create multiple accounts just to thumb them down more (when you see answerers on one question with the same/or around the same amount of TDs).
WHAT? This is totally unfair! You should at least make level 6 and level 7 has unlimited answers.
Sadly this is just a cop out from the fact that the moderation around here does not work. Obvious point gaming, trolls, “2 points” answers abound- and nothing gets done. It seems the only solution the Y!A team has, is to punish long time users who aren’t the offenders anyway! Y!a you want to sort out the abuse and trolling, fix your moderation!
pay more attention to individual problems instead of odd blanket solutions.
I posted before, but I have to post again to say that even after reading all the negative comments I have not changed my mind. I like the new rules and limitations, even though I am at level 7 and have more than 300,000 points. The new limitations will get some issues sorted out, though of course they will not address the issues of spammers and trolling. That is a totally separate issue that will not be addressed at all by the new rules, so in that sense I agree with the many posters who have mentioned this. I do think that the more senior users on here should have more power in reporting abuse. By more senior I mean people who have been consistent users for years, and there are hundreds of us. When they report, there should be a result. I report only very obvious and serious violations and often they are not removed, either because I am not “trustworthy” enough or because no one else reported it. What will happen now though is that many more questions will go unanswered. There were already thousands of questions a day that did not get answered, and now there will be many more, which will in the long run, mean fewer users here on Yahoo Answers because people will get discouraged.
This is no burden to me, as I do not abuse the system.
I try to avoid obvious pitfalls; the ability to ignore a really stupid question is Y! Answer’s greatest gift.
However, if I find an answer which indicates that the Asker doesn’t understand how to set up or go about a problem, I will try my best to help…especially since many “teachers” in schools today seem to teach “by worksheets”, because (sadly) they have no background in the subjects they are teaching.
Y/A’s team needs to address the real problem and not punish loyal members who have spent many hours providing honest answers to achieve status in higher levels. Sounds to me like you are trying to tighten a screw with a wrench! I think by eliminating the privacy settings making everyones q/a’s visible would help solve most problems, versus taking away hard earned members rights. Also pay closer attention to reported abuse by members as well.
Guilty until proved innocent ! It’s not just trolls who post in excess of 80 answers per day. retired older members, disabled members who have little outside contact and no doubt others are now being penalised along with the guilty trolls. This to me smacks of a knee jerk reaction to solve an insoluble problem. I accept that an IP ban is not a fair answer but this one certainly is not either.
Hmmm . . . I have a few competing thoughts about this. I am at level 7 and was surprised and disappointed to see the new limits. I can live with a limit, but would like to see it higher – doubled, say, for questions and answers in level 7.
I’m glad Yahoo is addressing the trolling problems, but I’m not sure this is the best solution. But I have no other concrete suggestions to make at this point.
In the end, Yahoo’s interest is (I assume) maximizing its ad revenues by attracting the largest number of “high-quality: users (and potential consumers) to the site as possible. And I want a decent place to ask and answer questions, with a minimum of “trolling.” Seems to me these interests coincide enough to keep me happy, and if they do not I tryust that Yahoo can make further adjustments to improve the site.
So I will give the plan a qualified “thumbs up.” thanks!
PS I also wonder how the reporting is working, from the point of view of Yahoo Answers staffers. Some days there are so many answers in violation I get “reporting fatigue,” and just stop reading. It would be nice to get some recognition that reporting content in violation is still helpful.
This is ridiculous. Why would you limit your top contributing members of this website? Why not try to moderate instead of limit? This needs to be over turned right now, just because a few high level members are not helpful does not mean the vast majority should have to pay for their mistakes.
Yahoo needs better moderation and reporting, Yahoo needs to actually listen to reports instead of allowing stupid answers and trolls to continue to exist on the website when they have been reported multiple times.
Better moderation, not limits. Come on, this is absurd.
it will do nothing to stop .. people point gaming.. as they will just make more accounts, any how … untill yahoo .. totaly block theses people from yahoo ie block there ip addresses for good.i know i dont use the site now like i use to .. too many idiots .. ect on it. clean up your act yahoo .. or loose the good people .
The problem is NOT the long term users who have helped and dedicated themselves to answering helpfully.
The problem is the level 1 and 2 trolls that spend their time giving garbage answers but still exist because Yahoo moderation is bad.
Fix your moderation, Yahoo!, and give the long-term helpful users their answers back.
i don’t like the new rules you people are placing on us level sevens.
why not just get rid of the spammers ?
and leave the rest of us level 5,6,and 7′s alone.
Nothing more than giving the trolls another victory & punishing those who abide by he guidelines.
Hey, I believe there are consequences for all actions. The people who “took advantage” of those limit-free rewards did not notice that you REAL moderators were watching. However, those who TRULY helped, might not help anymore. So there are pros and cons to everything!!!
Hey Yahoo Answers staff. Fix the moderation problem you’ve had since day on here and you won’t have to punish level 5,6,7 users.
This change is patently unfair. You are in effect punishing GOOD users of Levels 5-7 for the misdeeds of a bunch of Level 1 trolls. Please rethink this.
There have been calls and demands for those spreading the worst of the hate speech, racism and antisemitism to have their ISP banned
This would work for the worst offenders, including the spammers such as those advertising phone sex lines from India but Yahoo does nothing except to punish those that have actually made to the higher levels that Yahoo set.
People at the high levels dont answer ” I dont know” and such. They know the rules, thats why they have remained to those levels. People will still answer and ask those silly questions because they are new.
Ive already seen my reaction. Instead of answering people who have question, I pick ones that I want to spend my quota count on.
If I see it has one answer, Im not even opening the question anymore.
If its a question that gets asked often, they they can seach it.
This change is fine with me. However, you should create a higher order point grade for those that have higher lvs instead of giving them the same liberty as the lower levels.
After this decision was made I reenabled my adblocker for yahoo answers…
They don’t deserve to make any revenue if they aren’t going to be respectful to their community..
As for me, I appreciate this update. I think 20 questions and 80 answers is plenty, considering, as mentioned in the screenshot, it is PER DAY. This promotes the opportunity for us to provide more quality answers and focus on each answer, rather than just answering for the sake of raking up the points. Nonetheless, it is still barely a “limitation”, I don’t think I answer anywhere near 80 answers.
Cheers.
With these limitations in place why have levels. Just get rid of levels 5-7. And YA! points are pretty useless anyways. They get you nothing at all.
Why not leave unlimited questions and answers for level 6 and 7 since it takes a lot of dedication to get there, but put stricter limits on low level accounts who are most likely troll accounts?
The level 1 and 2 accounts are the ones who answer with “IDK” or “thanks for the 2pts” not the higher accounts. There have already been posts saying people are going to make more accounts so they can keep answering/asking how ever many questions they want.
Bad decision making by Yahoo Answers team. Punish the dedicated ones and encourage multiple account making for the trolls. Why not restrict multiple accounts by IP address? That would cut down on a lot of the problems.
By the amount of the comments above I would say this is not a change for the better. Albeit I am level seven I would not use the amount of votes, questions and answers now restricted. The problem I see it will encourage an increase in the amount of clone and violations of the T.O.S. with the creation of multiple accounts. I don’t see how this improves anything. I would rather see your time put to better use than punshing those that have been with YaHoo for years. Go after those that have many accounts than those that have obeyed the T.O.S. and have achieved upper levels by conforming to the Terms of Service. I have been a member of the Answers Community for five or six years. I have seen some improvements that were good and many more that weren’t.
This new policy makes it more enticing for the multiple account abusers who harass people to create more accounts if they read their level of questions or answers so they can keep up their same level of abuse.
I can’t believe that those who put this idea in motion couldn’t see that. Or is that the idea to encourage more multiple account users?
Does Yahoo Answers sell to its advertisers on the number of users showing or the real number of people behind those accounts? This seems like something done to appeal to advertisers, not stem the rising tide of abusive behavior that has sent many good people away from Yahoo Answers.
Point gaming, harassment and hate speech have increased a great deal in Yahoo Answers from the last time I was here.
This is beyond stupid, just get rid of the trolls. It took me 2 years for level 5 and now It’s like I never reached it.
Boo! This is punishing everyone for the bad behaviour of a few trolls and the lack of effort put forth by the inept, lazy moderators.
Not happy with this change, Y!A – not happy at all!!
This doesn’t seem like the right way to handle this problem, which is mostly due to the Y!A “self moderation” policy. However, I don’t ask questions here, only answer them. I would never post 80 answers in one day anyway (I don’t live on the internet lol). And I never vote. So, I don’t care that much. I would remind some users that there is still a viable way to show how good you are at this by trying to increase your BA percentage. That percentage is the thing that most that impresses me when I view another users profile.
All that said, I think you could change it back if you really wanted to do so…
You people are too thin skinned…all your restrictions do is stifle free expression. Just as in life where you can’t control the input of others and even the obnoxious serve to add something to your existence the trolls here also add something of value. Broaden your thinking and stop being such control freaks.
OMG! this is so stupid…
I don’t even troll and I will surpass the limits.
Here would be the smart way to deal with it.
Add level 8-9-10… and then also from level 4 go up +5 questions per level!
SO like
Level 5 has 25 questions
level 6 is 30
level 7 is 35
Level 8 is 40
level 9 is 45
Level 10 is 50… That would be the SMART thing to do… seriously considering dropping this site… Not only do we have to deal with
Classic trolls. Scroll Trolls and Reporter trolls. but now we have limits.
the funny thing it, the trolls always have multiple accounts… they usually never surpass level 1 because everyone reports them… so theyre always makign new accounts ANYWAYS. im sure some trolls have upto 20 accounts… Its so frustrating… the people who are REALLY getting punished are the innocent users… the ones who actually use this site to help people.
I am very unhappy with the changes, YAHOO you can do better!
Yahoo you are not getting it. IF you want this site to be meaningful for true situations then get rid of the sections where children play and not limiting people who do come to help. GET RID OF THE KIDS!
Really..? Even the level 7 accounts that got that far and have not done anything to ever get themselves banned are slapped with the same restraints as a 4? Serious real answers should be the main goal, yes, but to discourage the fun people also have here no doubt discourages their use of the site, just saying.
These limitations will make answerers, more responsible because only to answer a question would not be enough to get points, but the answers should be sensible and helpful to the questioners, I myself once gave a funny but not helpful answer to a questioner then I realize it and write a SORRY msg. on comments…so the changes are good to make more healthy our Y/A.
Here is another suggestion of mine, if you like it- many times, some answerers used abuses in (f****) way because they know that if they write there abuses clearly their questions will be reported as ‘abuse report’… so they misused the symbols like *. If you can ban the use of symbols in bad ways and instruct them to write clearly what they want…though they could be easily reported and their questions would be deleted….by the way you are trying your best to make it more healthy, clean and more helpful to the neediest.So congratulation to you and thanks to you all Yahoo Answer team. Mamy.
So basically this new change is taking all incentive to give good answers and help people away after we reach level 4 and those of us that tried to finally reach a Level to be able to do that with no limit mean nothing of any value to yahoo.
Now don’t all you level 5-7 users that strive for good helpful answers feel special, I know I do.
Maybe when all those of us that do strive to help leave for another site that recognizes our good intensions and helpful well thoughtout and researched answers happens and all that’s left are those that yahoo is trying to stop, yahoo will realize how bad a decision this change is.
This is lame. You guys shouldn’t have changed anything, the people that get to level 5,6,and 7 deserve to have unlimited answers since they earned it..
no trolls would be that high of a level.
This is a horrible idea. I’ve been on Y!A for years, and have enjoyed my level 7 status for a while now. This isn’t going to solve anything, because level 5, 6, and 7 users are not the trolls who post useless answers or spam.
Very, very frustrating.
I don’t think this is a good thing. It would be better if the Level 7s got a cap of 50 questions and 100 answers.
Well done Y!A. Keep on pushing them to Answerbag (which incidentally does not punish good answerers as harshly as you do). Take a look at their regulations. You might leanr a thing or two about how to keep users satisfied.
I’ve been on this site from the beginning and they have already tried this limit once and the users HATED it and it did NOTHING to stop the spam and pointsgamers in the main levels where it is a problem (5 and lower) and only hindered the higher level accounts. Why not make some more levels to achieve to or think about making 7 unlimited. I also don’t think edits should count against your total. Just my opinion.
Terrible idea. All the reasons have already been mentioned above but seriously just forget about this. Most trolls aren’t going to bother answering 80 questions per day anyway, so this is only punishing people who give proper answers (like myself).
People that have nothing better to do than sit at a computer need someone to put a limit on their use of the internet, anyway. Someone needs to get those people off their duffs and get them out to do something physical. I feel SORRY for some of the Y!A community that have 5 and 6 digit answers. Come on, people, get a life!
You people keep coming up with new and creative ways to annoy your users. I just may have to stop being one.
As many have stated, this is unfair. I am not one to even comment on such blog posts and I’m not as avidly active as I once was, but I love this place. I’ve looked for other places and they’re pathetic compared to the elaborate set-up here. The answers are better quality and trust-worthy most times. The trolls are the ones killing it, but if one lives in California where the answer limit reset at midnight, then they can easily troll all through the day, eat dinner, play a game/watch tv and be back. There should be another alternative as people will just use up more space with ridiculous names to troll. Some of the most avid users, one of which I know, will be seriously impeded by this. Maybe you should reconsider and find another way. Most of the trolls are people with no pic, troll questions, negative points in a week and having been here nearly 4 years, are still at level one. Maybe your team should spend some time weeding those out first. This limit isn’t going to help anyone and really will hinder the distinction between the best of the best around here.
This in my mind is ridiculous. Has Yahoo decided that Level 7 users are spam? No, the junk answers come mostly from those with new accounts, since they usually lose their accounts regularly. In fact, many Level 7 users provide the most useful, pertinent answers, and yet you now limit us to the same number of answers as Level 4?
This is not an improvement at all. If you feel such a need to penalize your most loyal users, why not relate it to the quality of the answers?
This site just got a little bit less useful.
This is messed up. WHY SHOULD YAHOO limit the number of answers we give for ANY level? Shouldn’t the point of this website be contributing to the community?
The irony here is that the limits actually mean very little to me per se. I’ve never asked more than 10 questions in a day, so limiting me to 80 doesn’t mean a whole lot. Likewise, I’ve never answered more than probably 25 in a day, so limiting me to 80 or 100 or whatever it is…means nothing.
I just find the process of unilaterally imposing limits on people who worked hard on their level…quite offensive to be perfectly honest!
It`s the old Army way again. You don`t want to weed out the troublw makers, so you punish everyone.
I thought you people were grown ups, but I guess I was wrong. Goodbye.
I think Yahoo! wants to concentrate on QUALITY over Quantity.
It makes sense to me!
I don’t think I’ve ever hit my limit on this site as long as I’ve been here. Even as a level one, I never ran over the limits.
Sounds good to me.
Yahoo Answers currently has a MAJOR problem with spammers, and people posting links to all sorts of scam sites (forex trading etc).
Anything which helps alleviate that can only benefit the site.
Having said that, I think the restrictions on brand new users do not go far enough. It still doesn’t remove the incentive for spammers to create dozens of dummy accounts in order to promote their lousy websites.
Personally I dont care about what “level” I am, I mean what does it really matter at the end of the day?
i try to help people
my answers may seem the same but i am answering what i feel people should know about before getting a dog.
they ask the same qiuestions, so i give the same answers
so now i have to watch and only answer 80 times
must be a better way to “fix” the system
i don’t keep track of who are trolls as i assume that they are telling the truth
ridiculous and hilarious
Is this because of those fetish trolls that i keep sending off to answers customer care because i report questions written by trolls, can’t we just ban troll IP addresses from using the service.
I can understand that yahoo are trying to ditch spammers and trolls and helpless people but the points chat is now pathetic levels 4,5,6 and 7 have the exact same daily limits I’m level 4 and I have worked my socks off to get there I was looking toward to reaching level 5 but not what’s the point if level 5 has the same limits as level 4 people must see where I’m comeing from level 4,5,6,7 have the same daily limits except the voteing once you have reached level 4 whats the point in levelling up anymore if you have the same limits I always give knowledgable top answers I give as much information as I know I don’t answe questions that I know nothing about I think this is really unfair and I’m I’m not going to bother levelling up to level 5
NO
RIDICULOUS
TERRIBLE
IT SHOULD’VE BEEN FORBIDDEN BY INTERNATIONAL LAWS.
LIKE, PEOPLE WHO ANSWER MY QUESTION WILL HAVE TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MINE OR ANOTHER QUESTION TO ANSWER, DUE TO THEIR LIMITATIONS
OR
THEY WILL KEEP SIGNING OUT AND IN, WHICH FIRSTLY IS QUITE ANNOYING, SECONDLY IS DISTRACTING, THIRDLY IS DISISTIMULATING.
AND BY THE TIME THEY GET BACK TO THE SECTION (IF THEY DID) MY QUESTION WILL BE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE, OR IN THE THIRD PAGE.
WHICH MEANS I HAVE TO SPEND THRICE THE POINTS TO GET A PROPER ANSWER.
YAHOO TEAM, PLEASE UNDO THAT ATROCITY. THESE PEOPLE WHO REACH THESE LEVELS ARE ELDERY PEOPLE, THEY ANSWER VOLUNTARILY, THEY DON’T HAVE THAT MUCH TIME TO BE SIGNING OUT AND IN.
THAT ACTION OF YOURS DOESN’T HELP AT ALL.
I’M BEGGING ON BEHALF OF ALL THE SMART PEOPLE WHO COME HERE FOR ENJOYING THIS RARE PLACE OF REAL INSTANTLY KNOWLEDGE-SHARING.
If they have to put a limit on something limit the thumbs. I hope they read these comments and realize that most aren’t happy with change. I myself don’t ask or answer 80+ questions anyway but the least they can do is put a difference between 5-7 besides the vote limit which I doubt anyone actually votes 400 undecided daily
They should have made the limits not include edits
This will be GREAT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It means less idiots, less people fooling around, less spamming, bullying, trolling, wise-cracking, and flaming.
It means more talent, knowledge, helpfulness, and Proper Answers.
Thank you, Yahoo! Answers !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is punishing the wrong people.
On occasion I give answers that are not helpful, but this is to people who seem to expect other people to do all the work for them, or are asking the same question for the tenth time today.
What about questions like “Does Vanessa have stinky farts ?”
Why are those OK ?
There is no point to levels 5 through 7 now.
Although I have been a member of YA since August of 2006, I just started answering questions two weeks ago. Averaging 2000 points a week, ~57% best answers and 1000 points away from level 5, I now see there is no point in continuing. I no longer have an incentive to help people here without any kind of goal to “shoot” for. Jeez, I’ve peaked at level 4.
This is such a sad thing to do to all the people that have already achieved levels 5, 6 & 7. And sadder still, for those (like me) that truly wanted only to help others while earning those levels.
Laying the blame on people that give lame responses like “Thanks for the 2 points” or “I don’t know” is ludicrous at best and deceitful at worst. I believe someone isn’t telling the truth as regards the true reason behind this change.
Why not just implement software filters to lose the spammers?
This is really lame. I worked so long and hard to finally make level 7, and now I am back to having limits like I did on level 1? C’mon. >:O
If a question is the most important group of words in any language as well as the process by which we learn, why are we suddenly being limited to the amount of questions we can ask ? If you ever viewed ‘ Inherit The Wind ‘ you would be able to see the importance of a question. Socrates has impacted our society to such a level, with his Socratic Method, that we now use it in our courts as well as teacher training academies. You cannot prevent, deter or stifle a person from asking questions. To limit the amount of questions is to reverse evolution to the dark ages.
You should not punish Top Contributor’s. Why not put the number of thumbs-down to the test. For those that do not get a high %tage of T-D’s, they continue with unlimited while the high %tage of T-D’s get 80 answers. It is a self-rewarding experience.
I homestly don’t see why people are complaining. Does anyone actually pay attention to what is going on around here? Why do people think that Level 7 users are any better than Level 1 users? I have pretty much seen it all. I’ve seen people who get 30,000+ points/week for months straight; I’ve seen someone answer 5 million questions in just one week. Do you seriously think point-gaming is any better than posting non-answers?
By the way, I do Y!A pretty much any moment I can. I will sit on the computer all day long answering questions and the most answers I have gotten in one day is 110. I average about 30 on weekdays with school and 60 on weekends. If this seriously affects you, then your answers either really suck or you pretty much have no life.
Standing ovation for Kay – she nailed it!!
“This new limit won’t increase quality. People will continue to ask unoriginal questions, and people will continue to answer with “I don’t know”. They’ll find ways around this rule (with multiple accounts, etc.)
The only people who are really being hurt by this rule are the ones who DO give helpful answers, as their answering capacity is now seriously diminished. I can understand some limit, but going up in the levels should award some privilege not awarded to lower levels.
I feel like this new rule won’t have it’s intended effect, and I’ll be honest, I’m quite bothered by it, because I spent ages trying to get to level 7, and now it’s pointless to be.”
Very disappointed in this ‘positive’ change.
so basically am just as good as a level 4 person minus the rating category? Im level 7 and all my hard work to get there is now bascially meaningless *sigh* Used to think i was special guest not
The least that could have been done was still kept with the theme of the higher level you are the more perks you recieved. I wouldnt have minded the limit if level 7 still had the most and it went down from there to the other levels. I never expected this change, if anything i thought their would be a levels added to add to the excitement of answering Qs to get to the next level, yet again *sigh*
This is bogus man. I answered questions to the best of my ability and felt sort of an accomplishment in reaching a goal. I know I do not answer or create that many questions a day, but having that ability was what separated us from others of the pack. I do not think I would have noticed the change if not informed, but still it is like punishing those that do good and follow the rules for those that break them. I guess you had to do something, but if you going to make the levels the same at least throw us a bone that will make us happy by providing some kind of recognition for those that provide good answers.
This would then be an excellent opportunity to revisit an Idea I had two years ago, and another I had a year ago: more levels.
You add four more levels
Level 8, which takes you from 25,000 to 99,999
Level 9, which takes you from 100,000 to 499,999
Level 10, which takes you from 500,000 to 999,999
Answerer Emeritus, which is anything beyond 1,000,000.
At Level 10, the limits are off and you can ask and answer as much as you feel.
At Answerer Emeritus, you are placed in the Hall of Fame. You no longer get any points for answering questions of getting Best Answer, but you get the credit FOR receiving a best answer.
What that does is it would allow other people to be, even for a brief moment, tops in either their country’s leader board and tops on the world leader board.
Also, in Levels 8, 9 and 10, other benefits should be rewarded.
So, Y!A, what say you?
Why are level 7 accounts being targeted for spamming and giving crappy answers? The spammers and trolls are the new level one accounts that are made fresh each hour. Meanwhile, those of us who give out amazingly great answers like myself (see my BA %) are being punished! Has Yahoo even realized that by limiting the amount of time their main users spend on this site, it also limits the amount of advertising their main users are being exposed to? Seems to me like Yahoo is once again, royally screwing up!
NOT HAPPY with this new limitation BS! I worked VERY hard to work my way up to where I could have unlimited answering ability and now I’m limited to 80 a day!? SERIOUSLY!?
i hope for 20/10 vote for one day because cheating user using it
Can you make it so that you can’t make a day-old account, private?
I’m nearing level 7; I’m not sure what to say on this.
*Smiles* but the Spam does continue.
This doesn’t bother me…I don’t ask a lot and I don’t have time for more than 10 answers a day.
What bothers me is that those of us who have been high ranked for years earned our free range questioning and answering. Most of us are actually pretty decent people who have a passion for discourse and sharing our experience.
Why did they feel they needed to put governers on our accounts?
I’ve been doing my best to make this place useful, and I’ve got nearly 100,000 points to prove it. You want to do something that makes SENSE? Limit people on the lower levels to answers
While I can see that you have a point regarding people trying to get to level seven by doing the “I don’t know” answers.
Is it really fair to limit people who have already gotten to level seven? Honestly how many of the people who are giving the junk answers are the level sevens?
Once we get to level seven there is no real advantage to giving the “cheap points answers” as we have already gotten there.
Take me for an example. I have given over 5600 answers and currently stand at a 38% best answer. You do not get there by screwing around.
Yet by taking that action and setting my (as well as the other 7′s) abilities to the same level of people who just happened to spam the forum.
Is that *really* the way you want to go? That you are going to punish the people who actually did their best to follow the ideals behind this site along with the ones who are the real problem?
Aren’t you throwing the baby out with the bathwater by doing that?
The greatest problem I see on this forum is those who have multiple identities, creating them daily! Trolls are the biggest problem. Why not limit how many identities someone can create? Start working on banning IP’s of repeat offenders.
I think it’s plenty generous enough. I don’t think I’ve ever posted 30 answers in my categories (Math Physics Chemistry). I’m at level 7 (60k points). Very few have been obtained by choosing a best answer for a question other than my own. I haven’t the time for trolling.
I think the people who are being penalized are not the 7′s, but those in the lower categories. They (if they like to make many contributions) will have a harder time reaching the upper levels.
The best way to do this is to punish the trollers and not those that give honest good answers. That requires discernment. Pay more attention to reporting abuse.
And those who give honest answers, report those that don’t especially those that are directed at the very young students who ask questions not matter how elementary you believe them to be.
That’s my opinion.
To whom do I report the abuse of the Y Team making a rule that does not do what it claims?
Concerning the Limitations on Level 5, 6 and 7 Users. The Y team needs to be reported – since this new rule I have seen more abuse unlike I have never seen before in my life.
So, seriously who is above the Y team that I can contact and send my complaint to?
Thank you.
People who earn points by giving responsible, well-thought-out answers (regardless of their level) should not have to be punished because of those who choose to be ignorant by not following the Guidelines.
I know that blocking IP addresses is not the answer because of people that use shared or public computers. If a shared computer IP is blocked, that punishes everyone that would ever go on Y!A and uses that shared computer.
I feel the emphasis needs to be put onto somehow stopping the cheaters, spammers, trolls, & abusers while they’re online and up to no good!
There must be some way to have more moderators to deal with the cheaters, spammers, trolls, & abusers in a much more timely fashion. If a Q or A is reported, it seems to take days (sometimes weeks) for it to be looked into by the staff. That gives the c,s,t,& a all that time to continue spreading their “crap” on the site. Having more “known” moderators available to actually deal with issues on-the-spot, might actually help to discourage them.
I know having their accounts deleted doesn’t stop them from creating a new account, but at least it might slow them down in the meantime!
It would be a such shame to allow these “spoil-sports” to ruin a good thing for the majority of us that have no problem keeping the rules & following the Guidelines!
i don’t think this is fair…. people who have past level 4 has got the same abilitys as a lvl 4? that is wrong! imagine getting to level 7 and your still the same limits to a lvl 4… it sucks! i only come here i help people with there awsers and it’s good, somthing to do right? but this just makes me sad.. im disapointed
Banning IPs don’t solve the problem. have you people ever heard of dynamic IPs which most of internet users have. it means your ip will change in few days or few hours. and someone else using same ISP in your region will get it. beside proxies.
You guys still think about punishment. but that’s not the solution. the solution is turn yahoo answers around and make it a user-moderated site. Change the layout of the site, now greenish “cute” and childish which attracts non professionals, kids and trolls. Make categories for everything, even for chatty questions so that you can get rid of chatty questions in other categories.
Make points more meaningful by assigning power to them such as moderating power.
Simply make yahoo answers like stackoverflow. there are no questions and answers limits as far as I know and trolls are quickly squashed because of the large community and many user moderators.
Absurd, thumb down.
Thanks. It’s taken 6 yrs to get to level 6 by answering, often in some detail, questions on at least two or three subjects that I’m an acknowledged expert it — and ones in which I actually can make money away from Yahoo Answers. I’ve given time and effort in an attempt to give something back for really nothing except a sense of personal accomplishment. Your decision to “punish” those folks who actually DO take time, effort, skill to provide accurate information will only drive them away. At least in my case, I know it worked. Bye. From the amount of drek I’ve see posted as “answers” and the anger I sense from most of the notes above, I can only assume the trolls have won.
Even now, there are people posting answers to spam questions. These people need to learn to report such posts, not post an answer just for the sake of two points. Those who answer the spammers should also lose 10 points when the question is reported.
I don’t think this will accomplish anything – trolls have plenty of other ways of posting rubbish. It doesn’t really matter either, I don’t really think I’ve ever posted more than 40 answers in a day, but I would like to see something actually EFFECTIVE done to stop trolls.
How about an automated system to check for people just posting ‘TL;DR’ as an answer, or similar meaningless answers? If meaningless answers were automatically spotted (or even if they could just be flagged in a single click by users), then if more than, say, 25% of a users answers were like that they could have their account removed. No extra staff needed, no great expense, easy.
It would also be easy for a script to check if a user kept copying and pasting the same answer again and again.
I will still help people by giving the best answers I can possibly give. If however I get to the point where I am being capped, the only people who are going to honestly suffer are those who benefit by or take my advice. If you think that is in people’s best interests then we will agree to disagree.
What exactly do you hope to accomplish with punishing your most loyal and faithful users?
Do you *really* believe that trolls and spammers possess accounts higher than levels 4 or 5?
And what of the thumb ratings? Why are there unlimited numbers of thumbs-down allowed? These should be severely limited, as they are used primarily for stalking other users.
I do not understand unlimited thumbs used for harm when stars are limited to only 100 per day… Receiving a star makes one feel good, it’s like being in Kindergarten all over again…
Yahoo!, you don’t care about the faithful… That’s blatantly obvious by your refusal to eliminate the trolls/spammers and other riff-raff…
All you’ve done is play straight into their hands and drive your decent users away.
A contact of mine once stated (through Y!A, in reference to trolls) that we have the ability to interact positively with many millions of people from all over the world, from all walks of life… Why are we wasting it?
I pose that same question to you. Why are you punishing those of us who really do try to make a difference?
I am not a troll, have not received a violation in over a year… And that was for asking “How to combat loneliness?” WTH???
Why should I be limited in my 6-year-old Level 7 account because your system is broken?
Perhaps you have answers for those of us who do still care about this place. Maybe you will fix what is broken before it’s too late. The trolls are on the verge of winning…
And why are legitimate comments here being deleted? Comments showing that Yahoo does NOT moderate Y/A fairly or practically at all? Especially when the comments point out rampant racism/homophobia/antisemitism and racist questions that haven’t been deleted in over a year?
I understand where your coming from Yahoo, but this is a very bad idea and all its going to do is start pushing the good users away. I’ve been on here since 2006 and all your doing is punishing level the users who reach the highest levels. That makes absolutely no sense. You need to go back to the drawing board and rethink this idea.
Pointless and does nothing to prevent or even reduce SPAM. I’ve seen the same person answer the same questions several times with different accounts. One answer with a link to each of the sites they are promoting and another answer with a link to their blog promoting them all. This does nothing to address that. I also have had my answers removed by this person reporting, because they didn’t like the fact that I answered the questions honestly.
I see blatant SPAM that I’ve reported and multiple others have reported that is still there. I don’t think this does anything to help SPAM. I think the community would do a good job of policing itself if there were things in place to allow it. For instance, some type of moderation of abuse reports. Many of us have had legit, non SPAM, answers that do not violate community guidelines or TOS removed and even accounts suspended just because someone doesn’t like or agree with our answer. We’ve also seem SPAM and bs answers run rampant and get rewarded.
There’s like no insentive to become level 5, 6 or 7 if you’re level 4 because you won’t get to post more answers.
I think there should be an increase in the number of posts if your level increases
I see a couple of things wrong with this; especially for the martial arts section where I participate about 90% of the time and to a lesser extent in the military section because I am retired military.
The martial arts section is full of wannabes, and egomanics some of whom I have watched their number of best answers jump by almost 200 in just one day. Yet their answers are not public nor the questions that they answered to achieve this. I will also add some of them have well over 100 contacts and friends posted to their profiles and a few of these so-called top contributors have now even made that private to hide the obvious ballot stuffing they have done and arranged to get them a higher rating or top contributor status. This change you now impose does nothing but make this situation worse and underminds the purpose of Yahoo Answers and those of us who contribute and particpate because we seek knowledge or help or are willing to help others.
If you really want to improve this forum, make every top contributor’s profile public, their answers and questions as well, and then those seeking help can more easily determine who is legitimate and who is just an ego starved, inflated poser, who has achieved their status and rating through false means.
I was never really interested in getting the highest level possible, but it does help from time to time when i see an upgrade.
Being a level 4, i suppose i now see myself getting to the highest point in practicality and the rest is just a waste a time, so i’m not really bothered by the limits .(i’d have to be extremely bored to go the 80 answer limit, and i’m more of a flash game player in terms of boredom)
Buts that just me. It does bug me, however, that good users are not distinguished from bad. Instead of trying to root out the bad with needed precision, your using something similar like a nuclear bomb, recklessly harming others in hopes of also harming the bad parts of it.
Rather than ranting and pleading, I’m going to drop some ideas, even though its rare that you read these and even rarer that you take into consideration. First of all would be distinguish the best and old time users from regulars, like that one senior citizen guy who was recognized). You should have a program people like those the “unlimited priviliegde”, making it more rare and validated, while still restrincting high levels.
Futhermore, you need to employ people to actually read the reports instead of just randomly ignoring, approving, and rejecting. You need to have them investigate the question/answer involved (especially for vague reports), the people who reported it (it takes 2 per report, right?). Its a tough job, but thats what their paid for (and being a worldwide billion dollar company, your techinically capable of that).
And last, as you have have already read and become irritating in seeing over and over in this particular comments section, you need to at the very distinguish the last three levels (by an extra 10 per level, or even 5), or take down and demolish levels 6 and 7, seeing that the only benefit is higher voting, which compared to answering, is very rarly done.
Well, thats my piece. I put this up with the moral satisfaction and knowledge that at least i tried.
Personally, I don’t like the points rating system because most of the answers I give require considerable thought and a lot of text to explain a given situation. In any given day I probably work as hard in Y!A as a great many other dedicated answerers and yet my points are very low compared with those that fly into a question, give a half baked 2 or 3 line line semi off topic answer and earn the same points as myself. I’d like to see a category for consise answers, based on answer content and adherence to the asker’s actual question in context please.
I want futer, i learn English better than now!
Level 1 users should be limited to 10 answers.
What is the benefit of being a level 7? There are many of us who stive to add value to this forum. That’s why and how we have reached level 7. Of late, I have noticed many of our more valuable contributors missing from YA. With so many issues on this site, you chose to address ‘limitations’ instead of trolling, obsentities, inappropriate material, stupidity, and those who ask a hundred times a day ‘what’s the meaning of life” or “is the world ending this year”. Great job YA. If you can’t fix what is really wrong, fix something that doesn’t matter. Appropriate during these trying times.
Why does Y!A get to change the rules in the middle of the game so to speak? Makes them look bad…
I don’t believe this will solve the problem of people with no expertise in certain areas, such as law, giving blatantly wrong or, worse, misleading answers. Other answer services have the same problem, as any answerer can answer a question or amend an answer posted by a person with experience.
Either set up an answer panel/certification by category or specialty, labeling the questions that will limit answers to those with the skill and experience to answer the question, or require review of the answer posted by a member of such a panel.
Stop complaining. Start VOTING!!!
Sensible, mature users don’t need (or have time) to answer 80 questons in a day. Points are irrelevant.
Helping people. Teaching, Assisting, Learning. That’s the kind of virtual space and experience an answerboard can provide. The rest is junk.
Go VOTE it away!
Changing the amount of answers those above level 6 can answer won’t stop trolls from making stupid questions, or people giving lousy answers.
Unfortunately, now all of us level 7s won’t have much to do anymore, as we’re not allowed to answer as much as we wanted to.
Great move yahoo! NOT!!
Okay i don’t understand limit me to answering 80 questions a week or how often? and the 20 point thing again how much time limit am i given here for the 20 points the same week?
It’s almost funny how in response to the changes, there have been many upset users going onto Answers and the Suggestion Board and demonstrating exactly why they do not deserve unlimited Q&A.
Yahoo!’s most faithful and loyal users would not need unlimited answers and questions. Yahoo! Answers’s best users focus on providing the best answers that they can rather than obsessing over posting as many answers as they can. This is a good step for Yahoo! to not only discourage the practice of quantity over quality and obsession with points, but also removing the incentive to point-game on Answers.
Eighty thoughtful answers per day from is far better for the site than four hundred one-line responses.
A lot of suggestions coming in as to how to improve things and rid this site of cheaters, spammers, trolls, & abusers.
I figure it’s up to the responsible users to continue reporting things whenever we see them!
It’s not difficult to figure out when people are not following the Guidelines. The Guidelines are pretty clear as to what’s acceptable and what should not be accepted on this site!
The cheats and trolls etc… keep their accounts hidden for a reason!
What I don’t understand is, “What is there to be proud of if you get a Best Answer or become a Top Contributor, but you had to CHEAT to get there!?”
And the spammers… they obviously have no life! They should be pitied! Very few people are so dumb to fall for their tricks!
To the Responsible Account Holders:
Until Y!A figures out what can be done to actually improve things on here… Just Keep Reporting!!!
can you recycle old answers or questions?
Is there a way you could remove them permanently?
Seems a very poor idea – regular contributors to YA enjoy the chance to share their knowledge and opinions.
Only the contributors who provide helpful or entertaining answers can hope to reach these higher levels. It takes over 10,000 answers to get to level 7.
These are the people who make this site worthwhile. Yet these are the people Yahoo is treating as wrongdoers and undesirable.
Does encourage us to make multiple accounts though. Just like the real trolls do
I worked hard to reach the status of unlimited. Now you’ve just taken it away.
This is a stupid idea. Why don’t you allow us to delete answers on our questions instead of limiting us. We have worked hard in earning those points and we deserve the rewards, not limits. Stupid.
these limits are ridiculous.
I make every attempt to answer every single question in the category of my specialty, and it has provided me with the ability to remain at the top of my category for quite some time now. Occasionally when things slow up i will answer questions in the parent category of my specialty. 80 answers is really not that many answers to provide to your top level users. 200 would be a much more acceptable threshold for the highest tier Y!A user.
Perhaps you need to add a new level above the ones that you currently have to increase these usage thresholds..
From what I can see, if anything, the spam problem has gotten worse. I’m seeing multiple identical spam answers to the same question from different accounts — all level one, so your new policy doesn’t affect them at all. Most of these posts have common content that would make them easy to filter out and block. Their accounts should be automatically deleted once their spamming attacks are verified.
I think this limitation is going to upset a lot of lvl5,6,7 users. I mean, if someone really just want to dump garbage, and spoil yanswers, daily limit won’t stop them. It won’t take them 10min to make another account and continue what they were doing. But, on the other hand 20 questions are a lot to ask each day, and to write 80 quality answers really do need a whole day… So by the time your quota is finished the next set is probably only an hour away. What yanswers want is you to take a break in the mean while, and have a cup of tea =] Really do find those “i don’t know” or “I will get back to you later” answers annoying…
This is stupid, it won’t affect trolls or spammers at all; they don’t get to those levels anyway. If people are giving stupid answers, limiting them isn’t going to stop it. Besides, there is something called a Report button…
I was looking forward to becoming a level 5, but now the difference is just thumbs, I am not as motivated to use Yahoo Answers, and what’s the point of level 7 if it’s the same as 6? I think it should increase at least slightly, or level 7 could even be unlimited. Having 4 be the same as 7 simply makes level 5-7′s feel like that they put effort for nothing while making level 4′s demotivated. (however, it also seems like a higher rank than before.)
Punish the spammers and trolls rather than all users.
Make the moderator system a bit more powerful as the user level increases. Remove points from question and answer limits each time a question or answer is reported. I don’t personally have a problem with limiting answers since I would rarely hit them anyway. I think the limits need revised as level 5, 6 and 7 users are unlikely to be the problem. I’ve never seen troll questions or spam answers from high level users. Most spam and troll questions come from level 1 or 2 accounts.
Allow more moderation power for off topic questions. I know at least one area that I frequent that I can’t clean up for fear of losing what little moderator power I have. maybe just give feedback to the poster of off topic questions to get questions moved to the proper areas.
Just blindly placing limits on everyone doesn’t fix anything. There are still those who will game the system just to get to level 7 because it is a status symbol. However , even those gaming the system would be punished under my system. Even a level 7 would eventually be reduced to a level 1 if the account was abused.
It doesn’t seem right to have 4 different levels with basically the same privilege, and this isn’t going to stop the lower level users from spamming anyway. People at the higher levels are more likely to have gotten there by being genuine Top Contributors in their chosen Category.
On the other hand, I’ve often thought the points system is to blame for the poor quality of contributions on Yahoo Answers. People post rubbish in a desperate attempt to accumulate points and move up levels in what has become a “game” rather than a genuine Help Forum.
By comparison, the Microsoft Answers forum doesn’t use a points system and attracts no junk amongst the genuine answers to user’s questions. The Google Help Forum has levels but doesn’t publish the related points, therefore you simply see your levels change quietly without feeling a mad rush to get the next set of points. Seldom is any rubbish posted there either.
Im a top contributor.
I post a lot.
Since this notice came out. I have not posted.
Im not mad. Im not upset. Im not sure why. I just havent wanted to post anymore.
I think its the injustice, more than anything.
I feel Im being punished
I answer in the Yahoo Products category. This is a customer service category and Im not getting paid for it.
Sometimes I feel like an employee. Now Im a punished employee who works for free.
There are so many questions ” why was my question reported?”
The appeal does not say anymore. Why was this dropped ?
If people know what they did wrong.. they possibly might stop it ~
This is a bad idea. Please change it back. April Fools was 3 weeks ago.
I understand that Yahoo prefers a systems solution, but this may call for a reporting solution or a statistical solution.
For example, randomly sample answers, or search for answers less than say 50 characters. If a crap answer is found, look at that persons other answers. If all crap, reset them back to zero. That ought to be enough to discourage them. Evening opening other accounts won’t help them. So if their only motivation is to give stupid childish answers, that should cut down on that substantially.
Or, even better, set a flag on such accounts so that when they post, it just goes into the bit bucket, perhaps with a feedback page that their posting privileges have been suspended. Even with new accounts that will eventually be the case. Hopefully most will tire and go somewhere else.
Just some ideas. I do not know if they are technically practical. Seems to me that this could be automated since this is just a database after all.
As you can see from many comments above.
SPAMMERS don’t have level 7 accounts. If they do there is something seriously wrong with the entire system and you need to scra it and start over.
i am level 3.. heading to level 4. And now seeing that I will quickly lose interest in this site soon.
Have you thought of making a level 8 for consistently high percentage of best answers? I am much more impressed by a level 4 with 50% best answer than I am a level 7 with only 15% best answer.
Pretty disappointed, now I have no motivation to move up in the ranks!
Worked very hard getting to Level 7, now that Level 6 is identical seems kind of pointless taking the time getting there. With the additional votes given to Level 6 it makes it even easier to get to Level 7. It’s not exactly fair to Level 7 users who were at this level prior to the change. I honestly liked it better before. The easiest way to curb spam would be CAPTCHA, not this. People will still do the “I don’t know”/ “Thanks for the 2 points” & other nonsense answers anyway regardless of the restrictions put in place. All this does is discourage the helpful users here.
What is the point of working up to level 7? What are the benefits?
This won’t affect me, I have a Level 6 account but I never ask anywhere near 20 questions per day or answer 80 questions, even at my most bored I might answer 20 or 30 questions in a day.
But.. it do find it irritating that there should be such punitive limits for Level 7 users, it takes a very long time to get 25,000 points and there’s nothing to be gained by it under this new rule.
If it cuts down on spammers, trolls and poes then fine it’s a great idea, but I don’t see how it will work.
Doesn’t effect me. I’m a level seven and I ask maybe four or five questions a year, answer less than 80 a day(some days it’s none at all, others it might be as high as twenty, avereage is probably between five and ten), comment maybe seven to ten times a year, and maybe vote a hundred times a month. My big concern is those folks looking to reach these levels and who had been hoping for unlimited restrictions. This could cause some of them to leave Answers altogether.
As for stopping spamming, as someone already said there are plenty of folks who just post “thanks for the two points” and they tend to be lower levels. Their just looking to reach level 7, once they get there with no where else to go their more likely to vanish.
I think this is a good move I think some people are over reacting. One, it is 80 questions per day, im not sure if any one can answer 80 questions in one sitting. Two, YA is already addictive as it is, the restriction is really a blessing, all of us who procrastinate or put things of because of ya answers will be free to fulfill our obligated duties or other various things that need to be done. And for those who call them lazy, they have lives too and are very busy Im sure and probably doing their best. There are way to many trolls with back up accounts, and lastly, just be grateful that YA is up and running, someone pays to keep this site running and this is how you treat them? just be thankful ,sheesh ,is that too much to ask?
seriously , this is just 4 levels , make a different between level 4-7 , its just number of votes.
for example :
+5 levels can receive comments on their profile.
every level have an special color over user pic.
(lvl 1 : white , lvl 2 : green , lvl 3 : blue etc)
and etc
Do people really care about how many points they have? How sad – it’s not like they’re worth anything.
A much better improvement would be to stop people asking the same question over and over. This is in 2 forms:-
(a) the same person repeatedly asks the same question over and over
(b) people who don’t use previously asked questions. As an example, in Astronomy, there are now over 10,000 identical questions on “will the World in in 2012?” which don’t even belong in astronomy!
I am very disappointed in this decision. I feel like those of us who have stuck with YA! through thick and thin are being punished. Why not just be more vigilant in moderating the question forums?
The most spam I see comes from trolls who made up an account that day to ask ridiculous questions. So… this basically punishes people who worked so hard or are on YA hoping to eventually get “unlimited” status in some regard. Maybe more of a push to use the “report abuse” or having “reporting abuse” be faster could of been other good choices. I just don’t agree with this personally.
If you did swifter moderation, or were more reactive to reports of abuse, this wouldn’t be a problem. I see canned answers, spammed over multiple categories, report them, and they still exist.
It doesn’t matter to me, I’ll never get to 80 answers a day, but limiting answers vs. reacting to abuse reports is just not the way to fix the problem.
I don’t like this decision. Its punishing the wrong people. What about the people who post questions that cant be answered? The ones who post solely to attack? The ones who dont WANT answers?
If you think certain restrictions shouuld apply, fine. Thats not a problem by itself. The problem is that, just like anti-piracy measures, you will hurt the people who honestly wish to contribute, and will have absolutely no effect on those who would abuse the system.
Sure, its bad that people answer with short answers that just exist for points. But they only do that *on nonsense questions that were meant to antagonize.*
There are people who disrupt, yahoo…And you are affecting all of zero of them with this change. Just so you know. You are only hurting those who were already playing by the rules.
This change is terrible. In the couple of days since the change went into effect, instead of people giving their normal good answers with a little fun here and there, they are now trolling more because they want to make sure they have their silly fun before they hit the limits.
Also, the Sapan Call Girl ads are still flowing just as freely. This change has done nothing to put an end to that, so basically you’re punishing the real users and not the true source of the problem.
Seriously, you’d think some of the people complaining on here had paid subscription fees.
To be fair, it does even the playing field. Its obvious that someone that earns 10,000 pts in a week is gaming! I think they need to have some kind of distinction btwn levels 5-7 though. Perhaps, a bit more anw power or take down immediatly trolls or rude anw’s.r
It’s not the level 5,6, and 7 users who are abusing Y/A, it’s the level 1s’.
2160 max. points per day. 15120 max. points per week.
Stop complaining guys..
How is this gonna stop trolls? Trolls don’t even make it past level 2, if they do, they usually get suspended, now you’re going to punish higher level users who contributed greatly to this site? This means overall less answers and less help to the thousands of questions a day answered. These new limitations defeat the purpose of a point system as higher levels have the same limitations as lower levels.
Yahoo Answers, please reverse this decision, never mind the users who already left, you are in for a new wave of good users leaving this site thus overall traffic to this site will decrease as will your Ad revenue.
Yahoo really doesn’t know what goes JB. This won’t help with trolling. the trolls and spam make different accounts and answers as many they could they don’t need to level up.
And some people just report just about anything. Those are the people who should losing the ability to report.
Also people will still continued to ask stupid questions and answer stupid answers. Maybe before you punish the whole world you could do some research and actually look into the problems and realized what you did. Some people work for years to get up to level 7 and its a rewarding feeling.
Now there’s no point.
I think a lot of the comments so far are demonstrating the mindset that this change discourages.
Yahoo! Answers is a site intended for people to share their knowledge and advice with people who are seeking it. Yet here, countless people are whining about how getting a high Level is no longer Speshul, about how they can’t post as many answers as they like, about how points should be worth privileges and benefits.
I think this change will go a long way towards getting rid of the mindset that users should care more about their own Level and points than the information that they provide in their answers.
I hate this, I’m level 4, I was so excited to be working up to a level 5, now its just like….I’ve already reached level 7, this is stupid, why do we have to pay for stupid trolls mistakes. Remove the leader board, there is no point anymore, might as well just make it up to a level 4. This will not prevent any spammers, they will just make new accounts. I feel I have nothing to work for anymore as a level 4.
This is unfair. Now there are only 4 levels on yahoo answers because 5,6,7 are all the same! This also unfairly punishes all of those doing right. I understand how some people give low quality answers, so instead of setting a limit, how about people can report the answers, and if done correctly, the points earned will be REVOKED!
I’m going to take a wild guess and say that everyone who insists that only level one users spam useless answers are NOT level one themselves.
This is absurd. No ifs, ands or buts about it. Just how many Level Four-plus spammers ARE there, that you feel some need to actually punish everyone above Level Four by taking away ALL rewards above Level Four? How many total are we talking about here, by IP address?
Now compare that to the problems we get from that India Call Girl Spammer posting Adult Content Spam about Call Girls in front of Minors on Yahoo! Answers. THAT is a huge issue. That’s a rampant threat to minors (bordering on exposing teenagers to porn) and a rampant abuse of the site (massive spamming AND abuse of the “not a dating site” policy to say the least).
Really, I’m not impressed. I’m the polar opposite of impressed. This does _nothing_ about bots from the India Server (which in turn doesn’t have one clue what an IP Ban is apparently), does _nothing_ about the Multiple Accounts abuse, does _nothing_ to repair the reputations of people Level Four and above–you know, the people you’ve willfully damaged so bots and trolls can have freedom of speech over in the Politics branch of Categories. Whatever that means.
This basically does nothing BUT punish regular users who abide by the rules. And in the meantime, hardcore bots, spammers and multiple account abusers walk free.
Between this and the forced Facebook “integration” elsewhere in Yahoo! Services I really am wondering if anyone in charge here has half a brain. Truly.
Im very unhappy with this – some days I only answer one or two questions – but then somedays – like today – Ive been on all day off and on while doing other things on the PC – and Ive managed to reach my limit – so I cannot use the site anymore today.
I think all this will do is mean more regular uses will abandon this site. I believe at least the least 7 users should have unlimited answers.
Honestly I will not be using this site as much as I have been for the last 5 years.. why log in if I cant answer as I please ?
Or what if I see a question I know the answer to – but Ive run out of answers for that day ?? the asker might close the question before I come back to answer.
Its just stupid. After 5 years this might be time to say goodbye to yahoo answers. it seems to get worse and worse.
This limitation can easily be bypassed by trolls with multiple accounts, and unfairly punishes people who spend time on here giving lots of “good, serious answers.” How about noting the amount of accounts created by one person and limiting their total from all accounts?
Well… this sucks. I’m at level 6 and there was always that incentive for moving onto level 7. But now that you’ve taken the incentive away and being a level 7 is essentially the same as being a level 4, working toward that level just became meaningless.
Like many other users have pointed out, the trolls are usually level 1 users. Most of us higher-levels got here because we were legit users in the first place. Why punish us? Sheesh. At least make some points of differentiation between levels 5-6-7. And bring back the unlimited Q&A system for Level 7 please.
I agree that this is foolish. There are some level 5 and above who post questions or answers as you have indicated. However, they are a small percentage of the problem.
So now these people will be able to ask less questions or inproper answers. They will still be able to do it and will still be almost untouchable.
The larger problem is in level 1 where questions cannot be removed even by competent reporters because of an apparent point restriction.
i don’t care, i’m at level 3 and i rarely pass my limit (500 more to go until at level 4)
i’m extremely happy that i don’t have to work as hard to get the same benefits as a level 7 person
(half amount of time as well) 
(corrections)
i don’t care, i’m at level 3 and i rarely hit my limit (500 more points until i reach level 4)
i’m extremely happy that i don’t have to work as hard to earn the same benefits as a level 7 person (in half the amount of time)
i average around 1,200 points a week.. (never less than 1,000)
Good move! I see this as a reasonable way to slow down the number one top contributor on Singles & Dating, and give people who post quality answers a chance to move up on the leaderboard. No one really has the time to post more than 80 quality answers a day anyways, so this isn’t restrictive to the people who are making good use of yahoo answers.
THANK YOU! I am level 3, and I see no need to get to level 4 anymore. HA! Finally all these losers with level 6-7 accounts can finally start being serious. Even they spam, they always get away with it because it’s impossible to report them. Thank you for finally moderating this. I NEVER comment on any of these articles but this one caught my eye! It was a good decision, Y!A, you’re really starting to make this a more friendly website to be on
By the way, I don’t see “asking the same question over and over again” as spam. If I get spam-answers on it the first, I see nothing wrong in re-posting it until you get decent answers. Unless the question is spam, then you should not be reporting it if it’s just a re-post.
Thats absolutely ridiculous. The people that do the “I dont know” or “thanks for the two points” are usually the lower levels and get reported and removed anyways. So how do we ditinguish ourselved compared to anything above 3? Rubbish
I want to say something about this and forgive me if it comes out wrong. But this is just wrong. I know I never get to 80 answers a day but I agree with others here. I work hard to provide good quality answers to people and when I don’t know something I ask it. By doing this I have had the privilege of getting to level 4 so far, however I am certainly thinking twice about using this site now that I have nothing more to look forward to.
I mainly answer Law Enforcement questions and I see every day trolls who have little or no knowledge of what they are talking about when answering trying to answer complex law enforcement questions that deal heavily with things like does the law cover this or not. I personally look up all statutes relating to my answer before posting. But I see people blindly pulling answers out of places that shall not be mentioned due to this being a family site.
People like that should be the ones Y/A goes after. Or at least gives select people who have proven themselves as trustworthy members of the community and pass a test the power to suspend people who do this.
Let’s use some common sense here Y/A. Lets punish those who are committing the offenses, not those who despise the offenses as much as you.
You have gotten a lot of comments on this change already. Most are negative and a few are positive.
I must strongly agree that there is way too much junk here. We have to wonder why it is so easy for us to see it, but nothing seems to be done. I see too many people asking the exact same question four times in one day. Sometimes they ask several times within an hour or two.
Why can’t the system see that? Why can’t it see that questions like “Which is better Mac or PC” is asked several times EVERY week. Same for “How do I format a hard drive so I can reload Windows” or “Why is the outlet in my room not working” These are asked so often that they no longer have value.
Why can’t the system see the spam answers that are the same for every question and tell the user to go to a web site to buy their software. Same for “IDK” or “I wish I knew” or “please answer my question” or other non-answers.
I report these quite often. Very seldom are the ones I report removed, no matter how obvious it is that they shouldn’t be there. I was “reported” when I answered that the person posted the same question four times in one day. I suffered because I tried to speak up. Is that the way good users should be treated?
If YA! moderators would act when I reported bad questions or answers, it would be better for everyone. How about the spam bots? Why doesn’t the system see them, when we do?
I do understand that determining a spam bot is not as easy as it might seem, but it isn’t that hard. Why do some spam bots reach higher levels? That is a bit insulting for those who earn their level.
all of these changes won’t work unless the Yahoo!Answers team does a better job of rsponding top abuse reports whether trusted reporter or not. Questions, answers and comments in obvious violation of guidelines continue to be posted because Yahoo seems indifferent to reports. The community is doing a good job of moderating itself. Now Yahoo has to do its part or this site will be taken over by trolls.
Question: When was the last time you saw someone over level 3 submit a bunch of spam answers?
I really don’t understand this move. Do you really think someone is going to post “2 points” 12,500 times? What you’re doing is limiting people who don’t need to be limited.
I think this is so unfair to the level 6 &7 people that have worked hard to reach this level, to have no more privelage than a level 4 users. You took away our incentive to work hard and give good answers so that we can have unlimited q/a power, this stinks big time.
Ive been trying to answer faithfully and honestly since 2007 and Im around 6000 points. Im proud of them as I achieved each level and Im still not listed as a TOP CONTRIBUTOR but thats OK , my best answers are around 35% out of about 900 answers,
I wonder how some people have 80,000 or 120,000 points , maybe they are cheating but this all seems unfair.
I think this would be a good move IF it were accompanied by actually enforcing the community guidelines. This is a very poorly moderated site. I report, spam, point gamers, insulting members etc and it all stays up. I’ve come to believe YA wants the drama of the violations, so there is no point in reporting.
There are threads that are cliquey and overrun with gossip. There is a whole “in crowd” in parenting that chats and makes jokes with one another. They gossip about trolls. There are users in the homeschooling thread that make it a point to tell users “Do your own homework” or answer just to tell the asker that the online school they are using is not “real” homeschooling. They could answer the question, but the point is to insult.
Moderate the site. It wouldn’t take much to do that.
Man, this is not fair to all those heavy answerers. I’m on level 4 and on my days when I reach the 80 answers limit, I get so mad. This was one reason I wanted my level to increase. Now? Now it’s kind of pointless. There are lots of people who love to help out and answer questions. If their answers are spam, they’re going to be deleted anyways, so why should it even matter?
Way to make Yahoo Answers less fun.. :/
This is ridiculous! People who are at levels 5, 6, and 7 are generally more reliable than those at the lesser levels. In other words they are generally more responsible and don’t get reported and banned.
This sounds like Yahoo Answers is lazy and refuses to do the job that they should which is checking out legitmate reports of trolls and banning them and keeping them from posting the same trash that that they normally do.
You’re punishing legitimate question makers and answers and insinuating that we’re nothing but trolls.
I got a better idea, how about we limit all new accounts to 1 answer/question per day for the first week they are made? I notice most troll idiots post on accounts with less than 100 points.
Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!!!
so you are telling me that you dont have enough power to keep people down other than playing with bits?
How will we know when we are close to our limit? How can I spread my answers, since I do not know my average answer-rate.
Your decision in this matter is a rediculous as sending IM’s and Emails to yourself!
Maybe I should do that myself instead of coming
to Y!A?
Were still going to get those (call girl in Taiwan)
questions and questions that are not a question.
i.e. a statement with a “?” at the end of it.
I don’t see the method in your madness with all this?
IMO… the brilliant mind that came up with this.
Couldn’t manage a line to a rest room if they were standing in it themselves!
What can I say?
I’m a “Realist!”
d;o)
good way to ruin Y/A!
go after the trolls and spammers and not everybody
Second post here.
At least reading all these comments will give me something to do for a while…huh?
d;o)
I cannot believe the whiny people on this site. Take a chill pill, people. First of all, this is a free site and they can do whatever they want with it. Deal with the new rules. This is not a big deal. It is not real life. Give yourselves a reality check. Then to address some of the complaints people have made about other users and other issues.
Why should anyone care about people who get a lot of points, or the number of points they get in a day or a week or a year? People spend long hours on this site for all kinds of reasons – because they are disabled, they are sick, they have had surgery and are recovering, they are alone and lonely, they are grieving for a lost loved one, they have not been able to find a job after losing theirs. People have their own reasons. No one here has a right to judge them. Don’t tell them to get off the computer and do something else when this site might be all that is keeping them going right now. It is very mean spirited to be insulting and rude to them.
And what about the people who vote for their own answers? So what? That is allowed and acceptable on this site. No one has any right to criticize anyone for that. It is no one else’s business. It is not breaking any rules. It doesn’t matter how many of their own answers they vote for.
People say they have “worked hard” to get to wherever they are – level 5 or 6 or 7 or whatever. People who think this is hard work obviously don’t know what hard work is and haven’t had to work much in their lives. This is something you do in your spare time because you enjoy it or you want to do it. It is not work.
No one is being “hurt” or “punished” here with this change in the rules. This in not real life. It is just an interesting internet site. Rules change in life all the time. Get over it.
Many people have criticized users who are in the lower levels with points, levels 1 and 2 especially. It is true that most trolls and spammers are at those levels. However, there are also great people there. Remember, everyone here was at Level 1 once. I have seen lots of excellent answers from people who were at Level 1. Ease up a little.
Those of us who have been around since the beginning know that this is not the first change that Yahoo Answers has gone through and it won’t likely be the last. That is the way of the world. If this change turns out to be not effective or to not do what they thought it would, then it too will go the way of all obsolete ideas and will be replaced by something else. Personally I don’t think there is really any way to fix all the issues without drastically changing the nature of the site, keeping in mind that this is a free site that anyone can join without proving who they are. It will always be a matter of chasing the ball around the room, but never quite catching it.
I’m so disappointed, especially since I had gotten to level 5 just a few days ago. I was so happy I was going to be able to answer unlimited questions. I ALWAYS try to give the most informative and thorough answers to questions. I do not like this 80 question limit now, because I have actually reached it once and was still anxious to answer more questions in a thoughtful manner.
This is not fair at all as it’s punishing everyone for something the trolls and spammers aren’t even going to care about. They are just going to make more accounts and post and post and post their one line answers. There needs to be SOMETHING done about the trolls and spmammers instead of punishing a whole group of people that have done nothing wrong and earned their level status.
I see it more and more these days, less and less it being done about trolls and spammers, and more and more restrictions are being added to limit normal users.
I can understand why this is happening since I’ve seen quite a bit of users posting spam of useless links (links that could have viruses for all we know) and useless answers, but that wouldn’t really stop them completely since they’ll probably still do it until they’ve reached their limit for the day.:/ As some others said, it’s not that fair for those that actually give answers since it’s not that easy reaching levels 5 – 7, if anything this limitation should be given to lower levels than that since the useless answers start from those that have fairly low levels to begin with. Plus lately when I report answers that are useless, they don’t even seem to go away like they used to quickly (and I’m pretty sure I’m not abusing yahoo reports since that’s why they’re there in the first place, right?).
Anyway, I’m not really going to have that much of a problem since I’m at level four and don’t post that many answers a day if at all… But again, it’s likely unfair to those that use YA often and actually give answers while those that spam will start leveling up and still use their limit when they do reach level five and up.
A lot of the so called top contributors do just spam poor quality answers.
I wont name anyone but an example is for a Mathematics question someone asked how to arrive at the solution to a problem. In the question they give the solution to it.
Someone just gave the answer which as I said was already in the question. So I can see a need for it to stop things like that.
However if there was better moderation to stop that then higher levels could have unlimited answers.
I answer questions almost totally in science and mathematics and occasionally dip my toe into politics for amusement. Basically I try to help people who are having trouble with the topics, so I spend on average 5-10 minutes on each answer. There is no way I can afford the time to answer 80 questions per day. so this limit is not a problem to me.
But I do agree with the comment that moderation on the site has left something to be desired.
I am kind of in the middle on this one.
The spam I see usually doesn’t come from the established user who has worked hard to build up their account.
It normally comes from the person who makes an account on the spot and uses the alloted level 1 number of questions to spam, and then they make another account quickly and do the same thing over again.
Putting a limit on level 5, 6, and 7 users ( especially level 7 ) will more likely just punish them for no good reason, rather than keep spam away.
I too would like to see the spammers go away, but when the majority of spam comes from a new account, there’s only so much you can do.
I like this. But the problem is that no matter how good your answers are, if you’re answering over 40 questions a day, you really need to get off and do something else.
Yahoo! Answers has just become POINT-LESS!
Yahoo! Answers, POINTS MATTER!
I have been a contributor to Yahoo! Answers since March 2006 and just reached Level 6 @ 10002 points, by answering 2,275 questions and earning Best Answer on a percentage of them.
At this rate, it would take another 10 years to reach Level 7.
Yahoo! Answers should award Level 6, and 7 users at least 50 to 100 points for best answer.
I always strived to give thoughtful quality answers. But Yahoo! Answers is no longer a forum where quality contributors care to give their time, because it has become a waste of time.
It is time to pull the plug on this format.
The objective was good, but privileges has been abused, and Yahoo! Answers is no longer a place that can be regulated.
Time to pull the plug.
Archive the answers, so that the contributors can retrieve them by Yahoo! Answers providing a way for the users to email their own answers to themselves.
Yahoo! Answers need to be redesigned with better security, and allow those who contribute good answers to become moderators recognized by Yahoo! Answers, so that they can report abuse and flag silly questions.
This won’t effect me, since I doubt that I’ll ever get to a high level, but I don’t really think that its really fair on the 6s and 7s when they have worked so hard to get that title and the same number of Question and Answers allowed as the level 4s.
I doubt that anyone (or a very low minority) who would have worked so hard for such a title would have done it just to spam.
I am a ‘level 5-er’ and have never abused the question answering facility in the way you are suggesting. My points have been earned over the years. This blanket technique is going to drive away the serious question answerers because they’ll just go and find other sites, perhaps not returning because it’s not worth it any more.
This is a bad move Yahoo Answers!
I disagree with this policy. At least add a few more answers/questions to each level; now there are basically only four levels. I’ve spent a ton of time on here, because it’s fun and (sometimes) informative, and have earned my Level 7 (though that’s quite pathetic). I have, on many occasions, answered far more than 80 questions a day. I hope that Y!A soon goes back to unlimited amounts for the people who have earned it.
I’ve been using Yahoo! Answers for years and have earned Level 7 not with trolling answers, but with answers that I hoped help people. Not that I haven’t ever ventured onto P&S for fun, but…
Anyway. What Yahoo! seems not to understand is that trolls NEVER make it above Level 3 anyway. They’re reported and banned or they get bored and leave. By limiting the users who actually took the time to make this site anything, you’re not ridding the website of trolls, but turning away people who have been at it for a long time.
Besides, you’ve practically eliminated Levels 5-7, as they’re exactly the same as Level 4, besides the voting privileges. And I, along with generally everyone who’s on Y!A, come to answer and ask, not VOTE.
I’m agreeing with the general consensus here, this is a bad move. Most of the people who get to level 7 get there through hard work, and hundreds of honest, thorough, and helpful answers. Granted, there will always be those interested in just the number, and this will tackle those people, but most spammers are level 1 users who come on and ask dumb questions until their points run out. With this you are removing the need to move past level 4, and punishing the most useful people in the Answers community!
Okay… there’s no point in this. Might as well combine ranks 5, 6, and 7 to one rank called 5. 5 will be the highest and 0 will be the lowest.
There’s no point of this new system, because it seems very straightforward and boring. Nothing special.
It’s like going into a restaurant with a coupon which reads: “buy one entree, get the second one half off (with equal or lesser value) and a purchase of two beverages.
Yahoo’s new limits in answers really suck.
I fail to see how this is going to deter spam considering the worst spammers post about 20 posts a day and then create a new account! A more logical approach is to post a legible, big red lettered note on every page saying”IF YOU SEE SPAM OR ABUSE, DON’T THUMB IT DOWN, REPORT IT!’. One of your problems is too many people think thumbing an answer down is reporting it.
Oh so sweating my guts out to get where I am in over 4 years [over 250,000 points and nearly 11,000 BAs] counts for absolutely nothing then?
Forget the votes and all you have done is make Levels 5, 6 and 7 exactly the same. WHAT exactly is the point of that then?
Like many others at these levels we didn’t get there on IDK and “Thanks for the 2 points” answers.
Getting to Level 7 carried a certain amount of prestige. Not anymore it doesn’t.
It’s obvious you lot at Yahoo don’t even bother to read the Suggestion Board. We have made thousands of suggestions on how to deal with the problems on Yahoo and what have you done? Precisely nothing to combat spam and the persistent trouble makers!
Instead of nailing their feet to the floor, all Yahoo does is encourage them more by letting them get away with it. Reporting thousands of inappropriate answers and whats the penalty? Nothing! They don’t even lose the points for it. Suspend them and you encourage them to make new accounts. So where is the deterrent in that?
Start hammering them with 100 point penalties. Persistent offenders, bust them back to Level 1. Stop making profiles private on Levels 1, 2 and 3 so we can hammer the persistent offenders.
400 votes a day? Useless! Voting that amount per day and you wouldn’t have enough time to answer any serious questions. When it was a 100 a day on Level 7 took over 3 hours if you did it properly! Who the hell wants to vote on 400 questions a day? At the speed of my internet that would take me at least 10 hours.
You are going the right way to lose a lot of valuable contributors doing this. Me for one!
You have given this absolutely no thoiught whatsoever!
Do you have data that reflects level 5,6, and 7′s are the primary source of these abusive/low quality submissions?
Anecdotally, abusive content seems to primarily come from low level users who have multiple ‘disposable’ accounts.
The “2 points” non-answer content seems to primarily come from low level users who have one account that they are trying to quickly level up.
If you have data that contradicts my unscientific observations, it would be great if you would share that with the community (But you probably won’t because Yahoo! tends to eschew anything that goes beyond minimal engagement with its users).
I suspect this policy will lead to abusive/non-legitimate submissions growing as a percentage of total submissions.
But I appreciate that you’re making a pro-active effort to improve the quality of the experience here.
tl;dr: inelegant non-solution that will exacerbate the problem its trying to solve. but thanks for trying
Some people are self-centered seems. because the system won’t affect them, that means fine for them. Do you people think everyone is same? I too don’t post much answers and this won’t affect me. but can we please think about others? There are people who post a lot of useful answers. Why limit them?
This:
-It won’t solve spams, because spammers often use level 1 accounts. they have no time to build accounts to level 7.
-It won’t solve trolling problems, because trolls use new accounts and they don’t care about limits and reputation.
-It won’t solve quality problem, because right now there will be much less incentive to go to next levels, beside there is nothing new in the limitation that force/encourage those who post low quality content to increase it.
You seem to have got this backwards. You are limiting long term serious users and doing nothing to stop those with multiple accounts. Restrict the number of questions allotted to level 1. Make it a sliding scale on first signing up only allow 5 questions a day, if any of those questions are correctly reported then suspend the account. Don’t start awarding points until the account is a month old and report free. That would make it far more difficult for the trolls who max out the points on an account and then start another one ad infinitum.Allow the level 5 and above people who pose a question to withhold points from people who are just collecting points with one word answers or with thanks for the points remarks.
I’m level 3 and have been using this site for about 6 months and some of the repetitive nonsense posted is off putting. I rely on some of the more experienced members to point out in their responses that someone is trolling to save me the time and effort of responding. If you are restricting the number of responses they can make you are removing one of the safety nets to genuine users who are newer to this site.
Make it compulsory to select either a best answer or no best answer. If people have not done this for already answered questions don’t allow them to post more questions.
I appreciate my suggestions may not work for practical reasons but at least they are targeted at the real problem which is the abuse of mutiple accounts. Surely you at Yahoo! can work out a way to do that.
I think any good contributor with more than 2 or 3 years and a 5% best answer rating should have higher limits. I think level one should be limited in the number of low ratings allowed. I really appreciate answers from the top contributers and experts who have helped me. I need them more than the guy who tells me to fry my parrot when I ask for help when she bites.
Find some way to limit the same answer by the same person over and over because that is usually a spammer.
Personnally I think you need to review this policy.
Spammers and idiots should never get to high levels in the first place, if the moderation system worked correctly instead of penalising people that tried to keep YA clean.
The greatest possible positive move would be to make ‘Polls & surveys’ questions cost 150 points each – they are never content that would ‘be of interest to others’, as YA material is supposed to be, 99% is just junk where trolls and idiots get points.
Make it so new accounts can’t use polls without doing something useful first and a lot of abuse would vanish overnight – or at least be in subjects that can be moderated.
Limitation will never fix the case of abuse. This just creates a black market process of selling leveled accounts. Those who are looking to accomplish unscrupulous things such as spam will simply find a way around it through multiple account management techniques.
And those who are just honestly answering questions related to their expertise & play by the rules are limited, which I believe is unfair.
If you really wish to combat spam, abuse, & increase quality simultaneously, you have to give the people asking the questions the ability to determine the quality of the content submitted by the people answering their question.
For example, a lot like a rating, if a person asking the question rates your answer as high quality, it benefits you as being able to have a higher number of, or unlimited questions & answers to submit for your account. But if the person providing the answer decides you are just spamming, for example, you’ll be rated as such. That means you may face limitations on your account.
But to punish everyone equally I believe is a poor practice of management.
Why even have level 5, 6 or 7 then?? There’s no difference between lvl 4 and 7, other than votes. If Yahoo is going to take away most of the benefits from increasing in level then they should replace it with something else.
This is ridiculous. It would have been better to just eliminate levels 5, 6, and 7. What’s the motivation for people who used to contribute a lot of high quality answers? Will not be fun anymore for those at high levels and you will still not stop the stupid people who spam the website.
While this change may seem unfair to those who offer genuine answers to questions, I can see how it is more likely people are abusing the 2 point earnings with non-responsive answers and how doing so clutters Yahoo’s systems with unwanted, unnecessary and useless answers.
As a sincere responder, I would like to see more people who post questions taking the time to respond to those who are answering their questions. Of course, these unanswered questions aren’t cluttering Yahoo’s systems as they are deleted thus doing away with unnecessary text files.
Personally, I sometimes wonder if my time is not wasted in YA responding to questions, given there are few less questioners taking time to select best answer or responding in general.
I HOPE YOU are listening to those of us that have been faithful to YA for as long as it has taken to get to level 7. The problem is NOT with the higher level answerers….it is with the lower level people. These people are reported by us faithful followers and do not reach the higher level. The percentage of people that are in the higher levels that actually answer the questions to be helpful….far outweighs the ones that are spammers and have made it to levels 5-7.
Most of the people who spam post on multiple accounts. And, with this change, what’s the use in even having so many levels anymore? Levels 4-7 are identical with the exception of number of votes. Why bother? There are basically no benefits to trying to give good and helpful answers anymore. This is coming from someone who is a level 7 and has been a YA contributor for years.
The different levels should have different limits. This is punishing the top-level people and is basically making the levels non-differentiated. You should include better means to flag answers that are low quality rather than throttling people. If someone gets to level 6 or 7 they’ve answered thousands of questions and must have given out good information to a lot of them to get the extra 10 points. You don’t get that way unless you give a lot of good information. This is a stupid limitation.
I dont quite understand, is this the limit PER MONTH or limit PERIOD. This makes no sense and again, you clowns at Yahoo have stuck your nose into something and start regulation where it is not needed. So what these people earn points for stupid answers, its not like we get awards or anything for reponses. So, whats the big deal? You should leave well enough alone. As usual, we are all doing fine just the way it is.
Everyone above me pretty much said it perfectly.
Yes it needed to be fixed, the problem at hand, but they didn’t fix it, they instead did something that will have little to no effect on the problem they where trying to fix.
I don’t personally see how changing all the details of how higher level users do everything, and doing nothing at all to the lower level users, will stop spam. Considering 97% of spam accounts are lower level accounts. All this does is slow down the ability of real top answerers.
Also fyi, I have seen stuff about EDITS counting as a post? That is messed up you can’t count a edited post as a new post, suppose someone edits there post 5 times, that’s 5 less answers they can supply to waiting questions.
Overall rating of new points policy… 2 out of 5 stars.
I would appreciate a response from Yahoo to our responses. It would be nice to know that the important users are heard.
Stupid move.
Nice. They can always fix it back if it doesn’t work.
What surprises me is that this had to be done, lol. I mean, who has time to answer eighty questions a day?
Well i think this is defiantly doing more hurt than it is good i mean sure it will cut down on spam but trolls will be trolls and still do the same thing so matter who/what/when or where.
To those who dedicate themselves to Y!A i feel bad for you but you shouldn’t really blame Yahoo! for this is because of trolls this happened I myself dont really have a problem with it because i never really use up all my answers anyway but Yahoo please hear me out on this one to make it fair to those who actually do something……….For those on level 5 6 and 7 i think instead of it being unlimited it should just be more like 120 150 and 200 (because levels 4-7 are basically the same……..)
If you really wanted to make Yahoo Answers better then stop allowing people to use it as a soapbox for their bigotries.
Yahoo needs to enforce it’s rules fairly.
THAT is the solution
So they got by with abusing the system through levels 1, 2, 3, and 4; and this is going to stop them?
I have to wonder if all of the comments criticizing the change when they’re completely misinterpreting the reasons for the change are being posted by users who know that are part of the problem and desperately want it to not be fixed.
Don’t like it
Yahoo needs to give moderating privileges to trusted individuals. Those who clearly contribute. Not necessarily in quantity, but quality. Yahoo answers could be cleaned up significantly if trusted people had the ability to delete spam, or even silence those who consistently spam.
As a member with over 12,000 points, I find this update to be insulting. Privileges received for climbing the ranks were too small to begin with. Now it is pointless.
If you guys do this. You’re going to lose millions of users.
There’s a reason there are level’s. It’s to differentiate those lower and those higher. We don’t work our butts off to help people, to be treated like this. This is unfair and just wrong. Level 5-7, are looked as higher leveled. We earned it and all you are doing is taking it away. These level’s earned many thousand points and spent time on these answers.
THIS LIMITATION IDEA IS JUST PLAIN STUPID. CHANGE IT BEFORE YOU LOSE EVERYONE ON THIS SITE.
How are spammers getting to levels 5, 6 and 7 anyway?
I report all abuse I see. I report the prostitution rings as illegal. Maybe I should change to just calling it spam?
If you really wanted to ‘protect’ us from trolls and spammers, why make it so easy for people to change their names, photos, and set up as many multiple accounts as their corroded little harts desire?
Yeah, not too smart, dude.
What exactly is the point in having a level 7 if it’s exactly the same as level 6?
Why not make level 7 at least, unlimited?
Who exactly is going to answer “I don’t know” 12,500 times? Don’t you think they would get bored of that joke after about 50 times?
I’ve gotten to level 6 without giving a single inane answer. So why am I being limited? Instead, make being reported for that kind of answer have bigger consequences…I report answers like that all of the time!
Wrong thing to do, there are those that put in so many hours and time, i agree unlimited is wrong, but at least respect their work and give them a bigger share.
You should have at least let the level 7 users keep unlimited questions and answers, I don’t think trolls make it that far anyways. I hope you change it back to the way it was.
The people who are level 5-7 are generally NOT the trolls or trouble makers. Those trolls don’t make it that high. They are generally quality, experienced users such as myself.
I would like to see Level 6-7 have UNLIMITED access, and 5 and below have the limited access. Your theory does not make sense!
How about this? Level 7 + Top Contributor = infinite QACs.
Well done ! . though it is somewhat disappointing for the users who have been here long time , but it has to be done in order to maintain the quality of site .
But instead of giving 80 answers per day , they would have given 100 per day . ok its done ,
I appreciate the YAT for this drastic change .. .
Thank you ..
I agree with everyone else, this is dumb, pointless, & solves nothing. May as well change it to max out at 5 levels, then. You could still change levels 5, 6, & 7 from unlimited to a higher, but limited, number of Qs & As per day. Example, level 5 could be 100 answers, 6 could be 200, 7 could be 250-300. Rather than this change, you could do more to ban those annoyingly disgusting callgirl ads, or have a rule that a person can’t post the same question in the same category more than once every 30 days. (I see a lot of instances where the same person posts the same question multiple times, I mean, come on.) This change won’t have any effect the abuse, spam, or other negative issues.
Not going to help at all!
I still see “I don’t know” from lower levels (1-2) and not from level 6 or 7. Focus more on the actual problem (1 and 2 accounts) and don’t punish the people who do nothing wrong.
To those of you who think that the limits are fine to go for, you are out of your mind. This ruins the fun time we have. With these limits, we won’t be able to entertain people.
Well I rememeber when I discovered this 6 years ago, you said this site was yours.Its your playground.So now you wanna take most of your toys and go home.So be it.
What is the point in level 7 then? It’s exactly the same as level 6, and levels 4 and 5 are pretty much the same as 6 and 7 except less votes per day, but a lot of people don’t even do that to begin with. I’m glad that unlimited has been removed but this wasn’t the way to do it because it effectively cancels out the purpose of anything above level 4.
As a Level 7 user, I have only one thing to say: THANKS! While I enjoy Yahoo! Answers, it is just to easy for many to abuse. This may help some.
You new rules accomplished something all right! More troll accounts.
Thanks
I understand that you guys are trying to cut back on spam and I appreciate your efforts, but what is this going to accomplish? I’ve been a Y!A user for four years and a level seven for at least a year and a half. I’m rarely reported, I rarely report others myself (when I do it is for good reason), I’ve never been suspended, and for the most part I do my best to be helpful and an asset to the Y!A community. Why does it seem like you’re punishing those of us who are on one of the “higher” levels?
Why isn’t there any difference between the top levels? It makes sense that you would want to stop unlimited abilities, but there should be a difference between all levels. There is more incentive to answer if there is a little reward. No reward other than your level is silly.
Gee, I’d think if someone took the time or commitment to make it to level 5 + they wouldnt be spammers really or abusing the system.
I do not think you should’ve limited level 4 plus users, come on.
While I can see how 20 questions and 80 answers might be hit by people who spend hours on Yahoo! Answers each day, I think it is more than fair to try and control the spammers and trolls.
On the other hand, it still means that the trolls have access to submit 20 garbage messages and 80 garbage answers a day.
What I would hope Yahoo! would look into is controlling the content of these messages. And what I mean by that is the following:
1) Did this user just publish the same answer or same question over and over again? If it is not significantly different, red flag it for a review by some moderator.
2) Maybe there is a way to prevent 1-5 word answers. If someone responds with “idk” or “I don’t know” or “thanks for 2 points”, that is accepted butnever published. Again, it can be red-flagged and reviewed by an actual person.
i think that all this level 5, 6, and 7 limitations is stupid. i mean im not in any of those; im a level 2, however its stupid b/c i was kinda lookin forward to that but know… idek anymore…. ppl are going to come a lil less often on yahoo now b/c of this. also this is unfair punishment to those who didnt do anyhting wrong. i mean this is Yahoo! Answers. not the government! we’re supposed to have a lil bit more freedom about wut we write.
instead of wut y’all did, wut ya cudve done instead was to suspend or expell their yahoo! answers license (or wuteva u call it) depending on how bad the thing was that they said. use ur brains, yahoo people!! DUH!!
I have to be honest: I am not happy with the new restrictions.
I worked hard to get to a level where I didn’t have to limit my number of answers, and now I’m back there again.
That seems highly unfair to the people that have worked hard to help people on Y!A.
Yes, there are and always will be people that abuse the system. The response to that is to ask the rest of us for some way to control that, not to punish everyone.
What has been done now alienates a lot of the dedicated users of this site and makes them less able to help people.
If the problem is the IDK and “2 point” answers, punish THEM. Don’t punish the most faithful of your users and information providers. You’re basically admitting defeat!!
Should have asked the Level 5/6/7 users what they thought would be a good idea.
I’ll admit that I do publish some of those low quality ‘answers’ – however, I must share that that is because they are because they are in response to idiotic questions/posts. So, I tell them that they are trolling or that they should grow up.
I’m a level 6, and with these new changes I won’t even bother trying for level 7 now. In fact I’ll be on here a whole lot less. Probably for the better. Maybe I’ll find something more fun and productive to do instead of spending so much time on the internet.
You should listen to the comments and don’t be like Google who doesn’t give a rat’s a*s about it’s youtube users. I give a ton of insightful answers and have helped a lot of people (they’ve told me). To limit my answers is a travesty. Yahoo is not doing terribly great in general and to call this a “bad move” would be understatement.
im on level 7 and i hope they change it back to unlimited soon, like someone said, some of us like me spend a lot of time on here because of surgeries and not being able to work and losing our jobs cause of more surgery, im in that situation and it kept my sanity coming in here every day and helping people out in the family section, it made me feel like i was contributing and helping people out with their problems instead of feeling useless like i cant do nothing, this totally ruined it for me cause now i can only spend a couple of hrs a day on here instead of all day, so now im more bored because of it, eventually i’ll go back to work but i wouldve like to have felt like i helped out as much as possible when i wasnt bogged down by work and now thats all ruined, cause i wont always have all this time on my hands to help people, i hope you bring unlimited answers back and soon, it ruins it when i have hrs taken away from me from answering questions when i couldve helped people, i shouldve gone into counseling
I feel that this is a bad idea.
The report button serves a purpose. If the reporting system were good, bots will very very rarely(if ever) make it to level 2.
Spammers however would be a bit more difficult as sometimes they give actual answers too. However if they are reported enough they shouldn’t be able to make it very far.
Basically I feel that the real problem is with the reporting system. If that were fixed this wouldn’t be an issue.
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you… very bad idea.
Very typical reaction to a problem. Punish those trying to be helpful and it won’t have any effect on the people who are just here to “play around!”
Sooo… why punish/penalize level 5, 6 & 7 answerers?
I am appalled, to say the least! In this case CHANGE is not good or well-received!
Thanks, YA. Setting Q&A limits for the higher levels seems to be a step in the right direction to improve the quality of the answers. It does remove some of the incentive for the level 5 & 6 users, but, hopefully, the current limits are only a trial run to gauge by how much should be augmented later.
For those of you complaining about these limits, find something else to do. Volunteer in some productive way in your community. Write a novel. Prove an unsolved conjecture. Do something of value for someone somewhere else. Or just rechannel your OCD in some other way.
who cares, this isnt money thats being given away. let people answer as many times
I personally think this is a horrible idea. It makes me less motivated to level up and work my way up there. So now I dont really care about Y!A anymore -_-; Its there cause its there. I’ll use it when i have to.
Good job punishing the upper levels for spammers frequently found in level one. You rock, Yahoo Answers admin! You really do!
This is a ridiculously stupid, not well thought out plan here. Why even go up to level 7, if there is absolutely no difference between levels 4, 5, 6, and 7?
What a complete outrage.
Also you guys really need some major work done in the violations department. Stop sending out that stupid ass automated message, and give false hopes about appealing a decision, with absolutely no end result. Have the courtesy to have an actual person interact with the users.
Also, I’ve always wondered this: How in the hell can you guys hand out violations for “chatting” on a site based on ASKING and ANSWERING questions? There is no logic in that whatsoever.
This sucks.
This was needed in some places more than others. Like politics and region.regardless this will not effect the non trolls that are just giving folks help. So basically your either unwilling or don’t care to crack down on the actual people breaking the rules: Bravo. Instead, your punishing everyone.
However, if this is tha plan and the 80 years with stuffed shirts and no prain should in cress the levels to Level 10 more so the many folks like my self that actually try to help people aren’t being gagged because Yahoo can’t gag the trolls and folks with 10 plus accounts.
at least increase answers to 100 for level 6 and 150 for 7
What is so great about being Level 7? when the last one I saw got from Level 5 to Level 7 in THREE DAYS??? and the 2 answers I saw from him (private account of course) consisted of “.” (yes, one dot) and it was CHOSEN AS BA by the asker. So, how do I know YOUR Level 7 isn’t just as bogus?
This will get rid of that kind of user. And give staff time to find the existing ones, without new cheats growing up faster than they can catch them. THEN Level 7 will be worth something again.
Maybe all the people above complaining about the “IDK” and “thanks for 2 pts” answers could start REPORTING them, too. At 10 points a report, it would keep those accounts from ever getting to Level 4. And then it would be safe again to have Level 5 upwards have more answers.
Ok now I undestand that you guys did that but you are all wrong the people who spam are like level 1′s and 2′s because they want to get up hire I spent a long time doing this spending time that is why I have about a couple hundred best answers because I tried and now there is absolutly no difference between 4,5,6,7 and I dont know anyone that is 4 or higher who spams I have seen it alot and they are from low levels punish the one not the all.
people.. it’s just a site.. nothing more and yahoo answers is almost never taken seriously as a portal to relevant information.
relax… if you want gains get a job.
I started visiting answers in 2006 and really enjoyed it, but certain past changes have curtailed my use already and I rarely visit here anymore.
The changes.
Putting limits on the answers of your top level folks..AKA addicts….will only cause people to go somewhre else for thier entertainment. Your advertising
revenue will suffer.
The spam and trolling seems to come from lower level multiple accounts made just for shock value and anti social behavior. Limits on the 5,6,7, level accounts won’t help that a bit, no matter how good you are it takes a bit of time to hit those levels.
Be smart Yahoo, addiction to the P.C. is your bread and butter and you are fixing to put yourself on a financial diet with all the changes.
I’m a Level 7, and won’t come close to those limits. But still … if the goal is to cut down on spam and weak answers, why address the Level-5′s through 7′s? Spammers and crap answers are from troll accounts that rarely get up to Level 2 or 3.
Kudos for attacking the spam problem … but I don’t see how this change addresses it.
I don’t like the new change.
Wow. This is such a horrible idea.
I’ve been on Y!A answers on and off since 2008.
I have been a top contributor in several categories over the years.
As a matter of fact, a little earlier last year, I was bed ridden…so all I did all day was answer questions on Y!A to cure boredom. Thank god this rule wasn’t up back then. I would have been halted a little after 2 hours. And then what? Wait?
No no. This is one of the worst ideas you guys have had since you made edited answers drop down to the bottom of the list in a question.
So getting to Level 4 is the same as getting to Level 7.
And then you wonder why Yahoo Answers keeps losing users?
hah.
I understand how you want to get rid of spam, but all three levels are practically the same. This change is going to make the people who are on level 4 or 5 not want to play because there’s no difference between levels 5,6, or 7. Even if there is a slight difference between them.
From the looks of it levels 6 and 7 are identical. Once someone hits level 6 there not going to want to play. Just a suggestion.
level 4 is basically the same as level 7? How does that help users who contribute to the community? This does not make sense to me. I think Yahoo Answers should give additional rights to each level, otherwise they are pointless.
Thanks for the new rules ! This helps a lot to keep trolls from annoying others by spamming. Thanks a bunch !
If someone (like me) is not abusing the system, then it has no effect (on us).
I also think the changes are unwarranted. What they really should do is go back to how it used to be, then add at least three more levels. As I see it, seven levels just doesn’t seem right.
Some of the most insulting answers are usually from higher ranking contributors who are in this for self glorification. They break all of the rules or ignore them. They ask questions with their answers, chat, become argumentative and judgemental. Imho, there needs to be more role backs on the prvilidges of top contributors and more policing of these people. Many dont like coming to yahoo answers because of this bully crowd thats insulting people that have honest questions. and please doont sayh” just file a report” because everyone knows that top contributors are never looked at when someone complains about them. I have lists of questions with 80 to 90 top contributors who have broken the rules or outright became insulting. None of their answers were flagged or removed. Do your Job better yahoo answers! Then maybe we’ll have a better community that people look forward to coming to.
I have to agree that this is a bad idea.
You have set a bar and now you are taking it away.
If you have reached level 6 you are not a spammer becasue it takes work to get that high. You use to reward that effort. Now you just take that away.
This is another bad idea Yahoo. A very bad one indeed.
For us who high level users who answer seriously, this is a major problem. The weekly leaderboards won’t seem as cool as before, and 80 answers is just too little.
It’s been a week. Has anything changed?
No. Trolls make new accounts daily, sometimes several a day to get around the rules. One troll keeps the same name each time and Yahoo can’t figure out to ban his ISP
idiocy
Terrible idea. It takes like a year to get to level 7. It is not a very efficient method of getting to spam.
That’s not fair! I’m on Level 4, but I still obey the rules. This is wrong. They shouldn’t limit anyone, but the higher levels? Let’s show them by not using this anymore and logging in every six months to keep are accounts from getting deleted. Who’s with me?!
i like the change
I’m not much of a poet but here goes …
Ballad of YA Withdrawal
Answer’s been around a while
And we’ve enjoyed the ride
Asked questions with some challenges
Answered them with pride.
We know the rules as stated
And sometimes quite agree
Though saying just that “I don’t know”
Is unacceptable you see.
Now we are complaining
About changes on this site
We want to answer more
Maybe stay up all night
We want to watch the leaders
As they make their way
Climbing the YA ladder
More and more points each day.
We also see the spammers
And trolls sometimes as well
The soap box riders preaching
And those who cannot spell
We do report the problems
Though no one seems to hear
We want things to be better
That seems very clear.
People here from around the world
From countries all about
Most come together with one cause
Just to help each other out.
Some users are just angry
Others are hurt and sad
A few are ok with the change
But most think it is bad.
Now we’ll find out if you listen
If you ever read this post
We like to feel we mean something
And are appreciated most.
While people revile the changes
One thing here seems plain
People still love Answers
And want it to be the same.
Or at least acknowledge progress
Reward the straight and true
Make all the levels different
Some feel that is their due.
Change is tough to cope with
It causes stress and grief
But life goes on despite the change
That is my true belief.
Please think about what we have said
Consider compromise and care
There is a reason we all come back
We don’t want to go elsewhere.
If you want to discipline a level 1 user should be deleted after a warning. Level 2 should get 3 warnings. I do realize changing the the code is a major project, but you have to come up with another idea. Right know it blatantly stupid.
Bummer. I strived to get to Level 7 since I started and now I can’t spend a snowed-in day doing my favorite thing, sharing my expertise in Food & Drink. First my SuperPoke Pets was euthanized, now this
So someone who only has 10k points gets exactly the same benefits as someone who has 25k points? What is the difference between level 6 and level 7? Nothing O_o
These top contributors are great for the most part but I have seen TONS of lousy answers from them, at times insulting. I’ve never seen spam from a top contributor.
I think this problem could be more easily solved by increasing violations monitoring. I report spam and non-answers all the time, but it rarely seems to accomplish anything because I feel like I’m the only one.
You’re upsetting a group of people that has made YA! possible. For their sake, I’d recommend you put greater thought into this.
I honestly think that the questions/answers/comments shouldn’t be THAT limited for people on level 5 or higher. Level 7 should have more than 20 questions a day. Sorry but these limitations are kinda pointless in my opinion.
I think that the higher the level, the more questions/answers you should be allowed. I don’t think it’s right to peak it out at level 5. Again just my opinion.
It DOES however keep trolls from asking/answering so many questions.
It’s awfully unimaginative thAt level 4, 5, 6, and 7 are pretty much all the same.
It was fun Yahoo! Answers. by
level 4-7 are practically the same now. VERY POINTLESS & you’ll probably lose a lot of faithful contributers becuase of this.
The least they can do is increase the limits for levels 5,6, and 7 because now people who are level 4 have the same limits as opposed to level 7′s
Why not get rid of level 7, as there’s really no incentive to reach it now.
Horrible idea, I am currently at level 6 and I worked very hard to get to this point; giving good reliable answers..As another comment pointed out, us high level members are now subject to this tyranical system when we generally are the ones keeping the trolls in line, you will certainly see the loss of longtime users and high level mebers as a result. Congratulations Yahoo Team.
So, what is the point of even having levels 5, 6, and 7 if they are allowed the same number of questions/answers as level 4? I don’t get the point of even having the levels now. It’s not like I get anything for being level 7. Guess I just won’t answer as many questions now… with a limit on Answers, there’s no way I’ll be able to catch up to the people above me on the leaderboards.
This whole thing is such B.S They’re punishing the ones who give real answers and try to help people, when the trolls are generally only on level one or two. They should be restricted, instead of people in the top levels. Now there’s no point in trying to get to those levels because there’s no difference between them.
Everyone can piss and moan about this all they want, but this is a great idea. It stops both spammers and lazy answerers who seem to enjoy the points system but hate having to earn those points.
Also it will hopefully cut down on the amount of retards asking questions like “z0mg does this boy like me??? plez reed my 40 page story before answering!!!”
Good show Yahoo Answers, good show.
this is not right. make each level increase by 20 or something.
After a week, I have found that it is obviously easier to ‘prenalise’ everyone rather than maintain the CC that should be applied. For example, I have reported 4 questions this last week that have stated their age to be 12 yo or less, and these questions have now reached the voting stage. The CC states ‘For safety reasons, children under the age of 13 are not permitted to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers.’
If it’s all getting too hard to maintain the basics, it’s time to climb down off the pedestal and give someone else a chance.
This is terrible i got to a level 7 and i can only answer 80 questions? i understand to keep away trolls and spammers but this isn’t fair
So all my work for 2yrs to go level 5 did pay off but now it when all down the drain!!! WHAT THE POINT HAVING LEVELS ABOVE FIVE? THE DIFFERENCE IS JUST THE VOTES. NOW I LIKE ON LEVEL 7. the spammer will keep on spamming no matter what the limit. THERE IS NO POINT OF THE LIMIT. PLEASE DO REVISED THIS OR MAYBE PEOPLE ONLINE CAN VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!! I DISAGREE & HATE THIS LIMIT!!!!!!!!!!!
You should cut down on people asking? We want more answers. Right? Even if it is spam. I just ignore the spam. What’s the point of the “thumbing up” and “thumbing down”?
Are you serious? I thought the whole point system was ridiculous anyway. All you do is ignore spam, it doesn’t kill you. And when I need to ask a string of questions, I have stupid limitations so I can’t ask any questions that are really important! Also, I major in the fish section and there are so many naive fish owners who don’t know what they are doing and desperately need advice. If I am done with my daily limit, all I can do is stare at their pets slowly die without the assistance of another professional. I am close to getting to the top. Change it back or I quit. This takes the last meaning out of Yahoo! Answers.
For those members that actually think this change would work – over week later and I can show where ONE abuser formed six new accounts and continues to posts troll and racist questions.
At LEAST give them more privileges than those of Level 4 users. Level 5 users should get more privileges than Level 4, Level 6 more than Level 5, and Level 7 more than Level 6.
You may have been capable of lowering the rate of spam on your website, but there is also going to be a drop in how many people use this site judging by a lot of people who aren’t pleased with this. Nobody is willing to try reaching level 7 when theres an answer/vote limit that is equivalent to a level 4′s limit. It will take possibly months to see a notable change, without hacking the system. You are better off keeping it unlimited because spam and trolling is a common and recurring factor in popular websites, and you cannot get rid of everybody violating the guidelines if it is a majority of the people doing it, otherwise there will be less people using the site. Even at that, spammers do not pose a threat to this website and they are not menacing to the other users on Y!A. I suggest you change it soon, if you don’t want dedicated members leaving this site.
There must be a better way to suppress the bad stuff. How about rating people and blocking those with bad ratings.
Maybe give level 6 and 7 better privileges if they have a high enough best answer percentage. Otherwise, I’m glad I haven’t been trying very much to advance. I wish there weremore ways to gain points or get a better rating like posting to blog(s) or other good participation on Yahoo. If somebody’s good on Yahoo then they’ll be good on Answers.
Well, that took the wind out of my sails. I’ve been contributing away trying to get to level 5 so I can edit my answers. Not being able to edit after reaching the answer limit has cut many a fruitful Q and A thread short. You are punishing us for the faults of the few. Shame on you. Why don’t you ask us before you take these unilateral actions, maybe we would be fine with putting up with a little abuse to not have the workable existing level system upset.
I have had no complaints about the quality of answers.
Yahoo! Answers appears to continue the tradition of fixing what ain’t broke and neglecting the truly broken.
Why don’t you reward high quality answers instead of penalizing low quality answers?
What a pointless move. There’s no difference between a level 4 and level 7 user except for the number of votes.
I’ve been a Y!A user since 2006 and am a level 7 user but now there’s no point. Why would people who got all the way to the higher levels post spam? We genuinely helped out people to get to where we were…
So now 4 level 1 accounts is the same as being level 7, hmmm interesting
I’d suggest adding a way to for users to appeal for a raise in their limits in any given day. This would make it feel like there really wasn’t a limit but of course the vast majority of people never would need or ask for the raise.
Maybe that is just too unneccecarly complex to implement. It also seems like it wouldn’t be too hard raise limits for high level users who also have high best answer ratios or something like that.
You’ve probably already thought of these things and they aren’t helpful but I’ve stated them anyway but I do see similar posts from other people here so these suggestions do seem meaningful to some.
This unwise change prevents me from editing my answers. And it also prevents me from answering as many questions as I want. And believe me, I’m giving very long indepth answers most of the time so it’s not as if I’m abusing the system. Reinstate the old point system!
Hi. The new rule of going to level 7 and answering only 80 question, is unfair. I mean, it should be 200 question we can answer each day.
Thanks.
Not that I use Yahoo! Answer extensively, but it is boring now to go on Yahoo! Answer knowing that once you reach level 5, there is nothing more to achieve. I dont vote that often, certainly not 200 times per day, so why would I want to reach level 6 so I can vote 400 per day? What I want is to answer questions, and the unlimited was attractive. Now I dont really care for Yahoo! Answer as I will gain nothing from going from level 5 to level 6.
I don’t often answer tones of questions, but on the days I’ve been in too much pain to do anything else I enjoy helping people. I have very much enjoyed this site and am Very disappointed that there is now a limit. Instead of punishing the innocent, kick off the abusers. I don’t know about others, but I report the idiots that give nonsense answers so that Yahoo can deal with them directly.
i worked so hard getting to level 5 cause so i can have answer questions all day on yahoo answers
Hi there, just wanted to mention, I loved this post. It was
practical. Keep on posting!
This is ridiculous, level 7 users RARELY post useless answers, it is the level 2-3 “users” that do the most harm because they are able to leave their ridiculous links and spam. Also, you need to fix your moderator, I reported 64 answers from a spam user, and only 40 points was deducted from this spammer’s acount, really Yahoo, you can only identify 4/64 spam answers that say the same thing? Pathetic.
Just get rid of level 7 then. It is exactly the same as 6.
Wow, 96 pages of replys and complaints. Good job people.
Awww:(
I JUST made it to Level 5 today! Then I got an email with a chart saying unlimited. Yahoo Answers needs to update the emails they send out! I got all excited for nothing. So basically now, Level 5, 6, and 7 are all the same. I am content with being on Level 5. I don’t need to move any higher.
I just returned to Y!A after a long hiatus…only to discover that I now have a post limit. I think you either need to increase the limits for levels 5 6 7 or allow some method of getting them removed from our accounts.
You’re effectively reducing answer quality for no good reason. I used to answer technical support type questions (sometimes hundreds in a day). Now i’m probably going to have to limit my measly 80 answers to the politics section simply because I care more about discussion there than about using answer on tech issues that people should be able to figure out from a google search.
At the very least, increase the progression a bit so that level 7 has 160 answers… that might almost be enough.
I loved yahoo answers but the limit has caused me to only use google services. Farewell yahoo. I hope you will not fail like netfelix once did after their announcement