Firstly, the module called “Best of Answers” actually features a number of different types of content; so let’s start with an overview of each of these types:

Best of Answers

The purpose of the “Best of Answers” module is to highlight the most interesting questions posted by you, the community. We can use this to feature either open or resolved questions.  Of course, if we choose a resolved question then we include the first few lines of the best answer too.

For this module we really look for content that’s unique or unusual.  The kind of content that makes us go “Whoa, I always wondered that!”

Special Feature

The Special Feature template is used to highlight questions that are being promoted by our team.  Examples include Celebrity questions or official questions asked with our Team account (i.e. Safer Internet Day).

Featured Sponsor

As you’d expect from the name, these feature questions asked by one of our Sponsors or Knowledge Partners.

Featured Content

We use this space to surface posts from our blog or to our pages on Facebook or Twitter.

How can you make it onto the Best of Answers?

We check the site every day for interesting questions, but that’s not the only way we select what we feature. In fact, we encourage you to submit any content you think deserves to appear on the Yahoo! Answers homepage. Have you found an interesting or quirky question? Have you provided a fantastic answer and helped someone out? Send it to y_answrs_favorites@yahoo.com and it might be selected to appear on the Yahoo! Answers homepage!

To increase chances of being featured:

- The question, resolved or closed, should be of general interest, and ideally something that is not widely known

- The answer should not be easily found on the internet

- Try finding questions showing unique or experience-based knowledge

- Ensure that an avatar or a personal image is used

- Make sure the content is clear and well expressed

- And last but not least, the content needs to abide by our Community Guidelines and the Terms of Service.

We hope this overview will give you a better understanding of how we choose content to as the `Best of Answers`.

Now, as part of Yahoo’s moves to make the web a more social and open place we are opening up Answers to people with Google or Facebook IDs too.

We appreciate people don’t want to be overwhelmed by different logins for each site you want to participate in on the web and through a technology called OpenID we’re able to eliminate the need for multiple logins across different Web sites.

After you sign-in with your Google or Facebook ID you’ll be able to fully participate on Yahoo! Answers.

Check out this video to see how easy it is to sign-in with a Google or Facebook ID:

A few points to note:

• For existing Answers members you’ll still see all of your existing content when you login with your Yahoo! ID.  However you also have the option to `bind` your Facebook/Gmail account with your Yahoo! account.  If you choose to do this you’ll be able to see all of your Answers content when logged in with either your Gmail or Facebook account.  Read this help page to find out how to do this*
• If you sign in with your Facebook ID you still control what is published to your Facebook feed from Answers through the checkbox on the ask/answer flow.  Your activity on Answers will not automatically be published on your Facebook feed.
• OpenID isn’t available for the Mobile version of Answers just yet… we’re working on it though and we expect to make it available in the coming months
• All participants using Google or Facebook IDs will still be subject to our Yahoo! ToS and Answers Community Guidelines when contributing to the site.

For further information on Yahoo! Fast Pass check out the Yodel Anecdotal blog post: http://ycorpblog.com/2011/01/18/id-sign-in/

‘Tis the time of year for saying “thank you”, giving gifts and rewarding hard work. Our way of saying “thank you” to you, the Yahoo! Answers community – for your hard work this year – comes in the form of this special bonus. Yes, it’s DOUBLE POINTS for every question you answer– four instead of two.

Why are we doing this?

We know you enjoy earning points on Yahoo! Answers, especially to move up through the levels. But we also know it can feel like slow progress at times, like a marathon… So, for a short while, we’re giving you the chance to sprint! With double points up for grabs, it’s a golden opportunity for you to make some big gains and go for the next level.

Has it started already? When does it end?

It’s live now from December 6^th and will last for a limited period of time. Want to know when it will end?  Well, we’re going to keep that a secret for now…

However, if you follow us on Twitter we’ll give regular updates of how long is left…

We’ll also notify you here, on the blog, as soon as it closes. In the meantime, make the most of it!

How do I get started?

It couldn’t be easier to get involved. Just sign-in (or sign-up if you’ve not visited before) and start answering questions. The browse categories page is a great place to start.

Tell us what you think about our Double Point bonus

We think offering double points is something you will appreciate… we hope it’s not like one of those terrible Christmas presents you just want to put back under the tree. But do let us know what you really think – we won’t be offended, promise.

Also, do let us know what you think by leaving a comment.

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.

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.

***UPDATE:  All maintenance has now been completed and the site is available again.  Thanks for your patience! ***

Yahoo! Answers is undergoing some essential planned maintenance on Wednesday November 3 at 1am-5am PST. Answers will be unavailable during that time. The Suggestion Board will be unaffected by this.

If there is any change to the schedule, we will inform you here with updates. We’re sorry for the inconvenience caused – we assure you this work is essential.

If you’re looking for something to do during the downtime, why not…

• Bask in the glory of the parrot on Flickr
• Read the 10 Best Places for Pasta in the US
• See who’s #1 in the BCS rankings
• Check out this week’s hottest new tunes at Yahoo! Music

Changes to how we display edited answers

**UPDATE: Thanks for all of your feedback on edited answers. We acknowledge you prefer keeping the ordering and we will make some changes soon to reflect your concerns.

When you are in a supermarket you’d be frustrated if someone put a `place-holder` down at the till and then went to do their shopping before `jumping the queue` as they had a placeholder.

Well, in a similar way we hear one of your frustrations on providing answers to the site is when people `place-hold` a position and use edit to provide a later answer, or to copy an answer from someone else. We feel this is unfair to misuse Answers like this and have now added a timestamp to show that someone has edited their answer. To make it fairer to others who spend time writing their answer in full before posting we will now re-order all edited answers to what is the latest position at time of editing.

Why can’t we just show the edits? We don’t have a logical place where we can show how an answer has changed over time and things like highlighting changes with a different color are quite difficult to show in a way that someone new to answers will understand. We also don’t want to prevent editing like we do currently on the question details as that will prevent you from fixing things like spelling mistakes.

Now we know it can be frustrating if you just want to make one small spelling correction but this is why you are given the opportunity to preview your answer, as per when you ask a question. If you find you are often editing after you answer, it may be worth using the preview just to have one last check before you submit.

Finally, we are going to monitor this change. If we find it does have a detrimental effect, then we may consider making further changes in the future.

Changes to the default images on Yahoo!

You may have noticed we have added a little bit of color to the grey face icons which show when no avatar or image is selected.

Yahoo! is in the process of updating these default images across the network. If you haven’t chosen an image or if your Pulse profile is set to `hidden`, you’ll see one of the five variations of this new image to represent you. The colors are teal, blue, green, orange and purple. It’s totally random which one you get and is nothing to do with your gender or activity.

Please leave us your comments on this small change.

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve created a brand new mobile site and it’s ready for you to use. Everything you love about Yahoo! Answers is now available on-the-go.

Will it work on my phone?

The new mobile-optimized version of Yahoo! Answers makes it easy for you to keep track of points, open questions, and stay on top of what people are asking wherever and whenever the mood grabs you. Our new mobile site will work with most phones but you’ll see it at its very best on the newest phones, such as iPhone, Android and the latest Blackberrys.

See it in action

We’ve put together this short video, to show you why we’re so excited…

With Yahoo! Answers optimized for mobile, you can:

• Ask, Answer, and Discover questions as you would on the computer
• Vote and select a best answer
• Easily access your profile, points, and open questions to check on your activity
• Check out new open questions being asked every second
• Rack up more points when you’re out and about

We hope you’re as excited about the mobile version of Yahoo! Answers as we are. Give it a try today!  To check it out, visit www.answers.yahoo.com on your phone.

My Saved Search is a great solution that helps you quickly find new questions on these specific subjects.

To assist you in finding these questions we’ve now launched a new email notification to alert you when new questions arise from your saved searches…

The Saved Search email

We’d like to introduce the new Saved Search email.

By opting in to receive the Saved Search email we will send a daily update whenever new questions meet your search criteria.  You can opt-in to the receive the email from the Preferences – Privacy and Communications page.

Where there are questions available we’ll send through up to three questions for each search you’ve saved.  By clicking through to your Saved Search on that subject you will continue to see the complete list of questions which is updated in real time.

My Saved Search

If you weren’t previously aware of My Saved Search, you may not be aware that you can easily earn 20 points by saving just three searches. Here is an overview of how the process works.

How to save your search

You can save your search from the following areas:

• The Search homepage
• Advanced Search page
• My Saved Search page

What can you do with My Saved Search?

From the My Saved Search page, you can now:

• Save up to 10 searches.  The main pane displays the selected search in real time.  The last sorting option you use is saved the next time you log in.

• Edit your searches to keep them up-to-date

• Delete your searches when you no longer need them

• Drag and drop to arrange your Saved Searches to get the most used ones at the top of the list.

• Manage these searches from the new Saved Search page by editing or deleting

• Get your Saved Searches delivered as a daily digest email

• Have the Yahoo! Trending Topic of the day included in your search results.  You’ll notice one search already there which you didn’t search for.  We’ve given you a `trending search` to start.  This is a keyword based on what is trending from Yahoo! Search.  It changes on a daily basis depending on what people are talking about on the web.  The trending search can be deleted to give you full control of the 10 searches you save.  However, beware that once you delete the trending search it will be removed forever.

As soon as you have 3 Saved Searches on your Saved Search page we will give you 20 points!  However, this will only be awarded once.

So go ahead – let us do the legwork in finding questions to answer!

Have more questions?  Let us know.

However, before you can see the future of Search on Answers, we need to take you back to the past… just for a few days!  For Technical reasons we have to rollback to an older version of the Search page before we can add code to introduce new features – it’s a bit like when the Yamster’s wheel gets stuck.  We have to roll it back a little before it can go forward again!

As from Monday we’ll be using the old URL structure on Search pages.

Here are the impacts and how you can work around this until we get the new page live:

1) If you’ve bookmarked your Searches you will get the error page as the URL will no longer be valid. In the interim you will need to go to the Search page and enter your search again.  This will return you the full set of results.

2) If you currently edit the Search URL to use &orderby=+date (to sort by most recent) and &orderby=-date (to sort by oldest) you will need to use the previous parameters.  These are:

• Instead of &orderby=+date use &s=+date
• Instead of &orderby=-date use &s=-date

We are sorry for the inconvenience this may cause, but we can assure you it will be very temporary and that you will really value the new Search functions we’re launching in a few days!