Yahoo! Answers

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

Here’s a rundown of the changes:

Mobile

Our new mobile experience has proven extremely popular with you all so far and many of you have given us feedback on what you’d like to see.  Taking this into account we’ve made a few tweaks:
•    You can now star questions from the question page on mobile

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

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

Changes to the Desktop version of Answers

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

Choose Best Answer, Edit Answer & Additional details pages

We’ve updated these pages to our new look and feel that you see when asking or answering.  By improving the code behind these pages too this should resolve some of the issues that occasionally occurred with special characters and text wrapping.

Question Page changes

•    Last month we made a change which moved edited answers to the bottom of the list.  Due to your overwhelming response against this change we have reversed it.  Now, when you edit an answer, we will display an edit time stamp but won’t move it to the bottom of the answer list. We feel this shows that the answer has been edited from the original submission without discouraging those who want to make genuine edits.

•    Thumbs:  We’ve had extensive feedback around thumbs and this month we made the first of several changes to the rating system.  Further changes will come in the following months.

• Thumbs up and Thumbs down will now only show when you are signed in to Answers.  When signed-out you will not see the Thumbs down icon but will see any positive ratings that have occurred.  This is how the signed out experience will look:

•    We’ve moved the Report Abuse away from the thumbs on all answers whether you are signed in or out.  We hope this will stop you accidentally hitting the thumbs buttons when you mean to report abuse

•    Also when signed out and visiting a voting page, we now display a sign in to vote button at the top of the page to make it clearer on how to vote for your preferred answer.

My Activity Page

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

•    Your identity information has now been modified slightly. We’ve moved your stats information to the right and now your contact information, nickname and start date to the central column.

•    We now collapse “About Me” on your private view of My Activity. This means your content is higher on the page than before.

•    There should now be no delay with your avatar appearing on the My Activity page after you’ve updated it. Previously there was a delay of up to 10 minutes of avatars updating on the My Activity page, this will now be instant.

•    We’ve heard from those of you with lots of answers, activity or contacts that retrieving this information in the new My Activity page can be problematic.  We’ve made some tweaks here so should you should notice this is all displayed much smoother now.

•    On rare occasions your nickname or avatar on the question page wasn’t taking you to My Activity page but to the public view.  This is now fixed and you’ll no longer be taken to the public view of My Activity.

As always we’d love to hear your feedback on these changes and what you’d like to see on Answers.

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Yahoo! has the unique ability to connect the individual to a community of 600 million people so they can change the world together. One small act of kindness can create a ripple of generosity.  That’s how good grows on Yahoo!.

This holiday season, Yahoo! is encouraging people like you to do a random act of kindness and update your online status to get others to join in. The more people who take action, the larger your ripple will be. You can see your ripple grow on kindness.yahoo.com as more people are inspired by your one simple act.

Question: What random act of kindness will you do this month?

Whether you pay for a stranger’s baggage fees at the airport or donate canned goods to the food bank, now is the time to start spreading joy. Check out kindness.yahoo.com to see ripples others have already started.

Need more inspiration?  Check out our Year In Review site where we’re featuring 10 inspiring individuals who changed the world this past year starting with just one simple act.

-Yahoo! for Good Team

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Since you can share your Answers content with your Facebook friends, it was logical to continue our collaboration with the social network. You can now become a fan of our official Facebook fan page!

To join our friends on Facebook, you just need to process the following steps:
1. Sign in or up on Facebook
2. Go on our Facebook fan page: http://www.facebook.com/yahooanswers
3. Once you’re on the official fan page, just click on the button ‘Like’ available at the top to become one of our fans
4. You’re now one of our Facebook friends

On this page, we’re going to show you the last blog updates; open questions from the team, partners and even some from the community. But be attentive because we’ll keep some original surprises for you…

Twitter too

If you’re not totally addicted to Facebook (it happens), you can still follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/YahooAnswers

Once you have started joining us on Facebook and Twitter, leave your comments here and tell us what you think!

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This holiday season, Yahoo! is rallying teachers, students, and its vast community to join together in support of education.  From now through December 23^rd, Yahoo! has partnered with DonorsChoose.org to donate up to $350,000 to bring classroom projects to life across the country.

The Homepages for Homerooms program is fun and simple.  Any and all public school teachers can participate by posting a project on the DonorsChoose.org website, requesting items they need to make their classrooms flourish – books, art supplies, you name it!  Teachers who already have a project on DonorsChoose.org can participate as well. After setting up a project, teachers and students can encourage their community to make Yahoo! their Homepage (called a “homepage set”) in support of a favorite project by going to www.yahoo.homepagesforhomerooms.com.  Yahoo! will also encourage its expansive community to participate by promoting the program across the Yahoo! network.  Each week from November 19 – December 23, Yahoo! will give up to $600 to projects with the most homepage sets, with a total donation of $25,000 each week.

As a bonus – every week that Yahoo! gets 50,000 homepage sets, Yahoo! will double their contribution and fund $50,000 worth of projects that week. And if there are 500,000 homepages set to Yahoo.com by the end of the five week campaign, then Yahoo! will kick in an extra $100,000 the last week.

The program is a no-cost, easy way to support teachers and students.  You can feel good about setting your homepage to Yahoo!

How can you get involved? It’s easy!

1) Find a project you’d like to support by visiting www.yahoo.homepagesforhomerooms.com/projects.  If you’re a teacher, you’ll find materials to help you quickly set up a project and spread the word.

2) Click “Support this project”, and follow the easy steps to set your homepage to Yahoo! Each person can set their homepage to Yahoo! once during this five week campaign.

3) Spread the word to teachers, colleagues and friends – and help Yahoo! fund more and more classroom projects across the country!

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Following last week’s changes to the My Activity Page, we have received several comments about showing the link to Pulse on your public profile page.  Remember your profile on Yahoo! is no longer managed through Yahoo! Answers but is managed across Yahoo! through Pulse.  Here is a quick reminder about how to control what information you share on Answers through Pulse.

Hiding your Pulse profile

You may notice there is no longer the option to choose whether you `Show link to my Profile Page`.  This previously controlled whether you linked directly to your Pulse profile on Yahoo!

There is a link on the public view of the My Activity page to View Pulse which is active for everyone.

However the level of visibility you share about yourself on Pulse is controlled by you.  This controls how you are viewed across all Yahoo! properties from `Settings `–> `Privacy` and the `Manage Privacy Settings` page within Pulse.

If you set this as `Hide my profile`  then when someone view your Pulse profile they will only be shown the following:

Images and Avatars

Pulse manages all your images and avatars for your specific Yahoo! properties that you use.

Your avatar will be hidden if you have checked “hide my profile” on your Pulse privacy settings and an exclamation mark will be shown instead.

If you want your avatar visible to others you have to have your nickname/avatar visible and the hide option unchecked for your image to be visible on Yahoo! Answers.

We hope this clarifies how this setting works.  Here in the Answers team we’re focusing on enhancing the Q&A experience for you, this means we need to leave the profile aspect to the Pulse team.  If you need further advice on the settings within Pulse, check out their help pages.

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