Yahoo! Canada Answers Blog

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!

As we continue to change and improve Answers, we wanted to improve the ways we communicate and expand the ways we engage with you, the Answers community. We hope our shiny, new blog will help us do just that!

So what’s changed? On the upper right of the page, you’ll see a link to Yahoo! Canada Answers, as well as tools for finding information. The Search box gives you three places to look in: Blog, Web or Answers. If you still don’t find what you need, you can post a question directly to Answers from the box below Search.

You’ll also find links to blogs we like and recent readers from the MyBlogLog community. Be sure to join the MyBlogLog community and see your profile appear in this section.

Beneath each post, you can comment on it (please do!), add the post to del.icio.us or go directly to Yahoo! Canada Answers.

What hasn’t changed? The Yahoo! Canada Answers blog is still the place to come for product updates, announcements, community guideline features, and staff picks as well as timely, anecdotal, and (we hope) informative posts highlighting the topics we find in our meanderings through the Answers community.

Thanks for checking out our new blog!