Yahoo! Canada Answers Blog

To continuing improving your Yahoo! Answers experience we have introduced a few small changes this week…

Changing time to choose a Best Answer

Based on your feedback to be able to resolve a question quicker, we have now reduced the wait time to choose a best answer from 4 hours to 1 hour. If you now receive multiple responses within an hour you can select one of those as your Best Answer, or choose to put the question to vote at this earlier stage.

The full lifecycle of a question won’t change – questions will still be open for 4 days and up to maximum of 8 days if you extend the expiration. This change gives you the option to resolve earlier or put to vote earlier. If you take no action to resolve or extend the question, the question will automatically go to vote for the Best Answer.

Optional Preview screen when answering questions

Many of you have commented that to you’d prefer an answering experience without having to see your response on the Preview page first. We are now able to offer this…

If you are signed-in with your Answers account and have answered at least one question before then when submitting your answer you can choose to Submit your response immediately without going to the Preview page first. We’ve kept the Preview page too, so you can still see how your response will look before publishing it.

What makes Yahoo! Answers unique is the avid involvement of the community it is YOU that provides the content so continue to ask, answer and vote!

Following last week’s changes to Search and the Fans/Contacts system we now have a few more changes to share with you…

Edit My Preferences page

To keep public information and your personal settings separate we’ve made further changes on the `Edit my preferences` pages.

As with the previous preference page you can still add your photo or avatar from here or change your screen name which will both be used across your Yahoo! experience.  We’ve made this page a little lighter to view by splitting out how you will be seen on Answers from your personal preferences on Privacy and Communications.

The Privacy and Communications tab gives you control to receive specific notifications such as when `someone becomes your fan` or when `there are new questions for My Saved Searches` – and whether you allow fans at all.

Hiding your 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!

This setting is now controlled across all Yahoo! properties from `Settings`–> `Privacy` and the `Manage Privacy Settings` page on Yahoo! Pulse.

Many of you have voiced concerns about the misuse of the Fans and Contacts feature.

Firstly, we’re aware how strongly many of you feel about this and we’ve heard and taken on board your feedback: we’re sorry we’ve taken so long to address a problem that may have affected your experience of Answers.

However, as of today, we are now making improvements to how Contacts and Fans work on Answers to ensure that your experience on the site is better.

In addition to Contacts and Fans you’ll notice some changes to Voting limits on Answers. First of all…let’s cover Fans and Contacts:

What will my Fans see?

Anyone can become your fan by adding you as a `contact`. Once someone has added you as a contact:

• Fans will get latest updates when you ask questions in the `From my Network` tab

• Email notification when you ask a question

If you don’t want to allow fans at all – you can set this in your Preferences.

If you don’t want a certain member to be aware of this information you can block them from the My Network page.

If your Q&A and Answers network are marked as `My Contacts Only` on your`Preferences` page, Fans will not gain access to view your content or your network.

Want to know when someone has become your fan? You can activate a notification in your profile page to receive an email when someone becomes your fan.

What will my Contacts see?

Contacts are those people you choose to add and you will be sharing your content with them.

Once you add a contact they will:

• See your questions and answers

• Get an update on the homepage in the `From my Network` tab when you ask a question

• Have visibility of your Answers Network

Everyone likes to receive the kudos of having new `Fans` of their content and this change will keep the overall control of `who-sees-what` with you.

Keep watching this space – this will be just the first step in changes we have planned for how Contacts and Fans should work and the benefits they bring as we continue to make this feature work for you.

Changes to voting limits

We’ve noticed that many you in the Answers community are very avid voters!

To help you continue to feed this passion we’ve now increased the daily limits for the number of votes you can cast. The new maximum daily are:

• Level 1: 25 votes per day

• Level 2: 50 votes per day

• Level 3: 75 votes per day

• Level 4: 100 votes per day

• Level 5: 125 votes per day

• Level 6: 150 votes per day

• Level 7: 200 votes per day

So what’s stopping you? Get voting!

Flickr photo by pjotr_

The Yahoo! Answers engineers are scheduled to perform regular maintenance on Thursday, June 19, starting at 02.00 a.m. ET.

We expect the work to last about 2½ hours and there will be a total outage on Yahoo! Canada Answers during this time.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience, and will keep you posted if there are any changes to the schedule.

If you are looking for something else to do during this time, why not check out some of our new and updated sites?

* Flickr (now with video!)
* Yahoo! Canada Travel
* Yahoo! Canada Music
* Yahoo! Canada Video

Or, maybe you can check out what’s on the tube or what’s in store for your future?