Yahoo! India Answers blog

Today, we announced that we are sunsetting a few products. For the full list, please click here. Since some of you use Yahoo! Avatars, we wanted to let you know that it will be going away. However, you can easily save your avatar if you’d like to use it in the future:

Yahoo! Avatars

Effective April 1, 2013 we will no longer support Yahoo! Avatars. If you like your existing avatar and want to keep it, please go to the Avatars download page, pick a picture size and format, and click the appropriate download button. Similarly, if you want to edit your avatar, download the image and then use a photo editing service of your preference. If you want to continue using your avatar on our products, go to profile.yahoo.com and upload the avatar you downloaded. For more details, please click here. Additionally effective April 1, we will no longer support the Avatars YQL table.

Thanks for using Yahoo! Answers.

In November we introduced a new event called AnswerDash. It was an Answers marathon where you tried to get the most Best Answers in 4 days/96 hours.

We are extremely happy to announce the winners of AnswerDash. We do apologize it took some time, but we wanted to make sure we were fair and the winners deserved the prize. No multiple accounts or cheating. Now let’s get started!

Winners for the grand prize are:

First Place:

Yahzmin: love 4ever (US)

Second Place:

TLACAÉLEL (MX)

Third Place:

Buffy Staffordshire (US)

We had also announced rewards in terms of points for the top 20 participants. A special shout out to all of them for their great efforts.

20 Runners-Up:

Mago (BR)

Postal p (US)

M A Ranatha (UK)

Bibianna (BR)

Peter S (US)

kb (US)

echinopsis (DE)

? (BR)

Antithée Spirituel (FR)

Pedro Carvalho (BR)

lilinha32 (BR)

nas88car300$24 wins race Blue Duece wins the CUP!! (US)

TB (US)

cantilena91 (US)

Jit (US)

Medicina (BR)

fhotoace (US)

✰✰✰✰ Ms. Christmas ✰✰✰✰ (BR)

Charlie (US)

Anjaree (US)

And…as a special holiday treat to all our wonderful community, we were astounded by the fantastic response from our community. So we decided we shall announce the winners for each level. The top 3 members at each of these levels will get 100 points!

Level 1:

Alex Hasper (BR)

Lolla Fernandez (BR)

Matheus (BR)

Level 2:

Samuel (BR)

Thyeor (ES)

Matt (US)

Level 3:

kat (US)

machfudz aji (ID)

Level 4:

Jit (US)

GABRIEL ᵀᴴᴱ ᴼᴿᴵᴳᴵᴺᴬ (BR)

James (US)

Level 5:

One (US)

Educated Silence (US)

a-p (AU)

Level 6:

θ βяιαη θ₂ (US)

Max 80 (MX)

Charlie (US)

Congratulations to ALL the winners!

We are thrilled to have such a wonderful and vibrant community. Enjoy your year end celebrations and we’re looking forward to more in 2013.

Thanks for reading,

One of the great things about the Yahoo! Answers community is that millions of users around the world take pride in helping each other by answering questions based on their firsthand knowledge and experience.
We’ve heard directly from many of you that you spend time actively looking for questions that match your interests, just so that you can share your expertise.

Today we’ve made that possible with our Question Recommender. You’ll see a new module on the Yahoo! Answers homepage that finds topics of relevance to you: the Question Recommender. It will consider your answering history and will generate personalized recommendations.

Here’s How it Works

The Question Recommender will present a set of 20 questions tailored for you. If you come across a question that’s a mismatch, of course you can reject it by hovering over a question in the Recommended Tab and then clicking the “X” button. Rejected questions will not appear again in the list. A new set of recommended questions can be generated with the refresh button at the bottom of the module.

The Question Recommender is currently available on our English language sites. We plan to extend this feature to other languages in the future, in addition to testing additional new features in an effort to make Yahoo! Answers the best possible experience for you.

We hope you find the Question Recommender a useful tool to find and answer more questions in less time.

Happy knowledge sharing!

For a limited time, you can earn an extra 2 points for every question you answer.

‘Tis the season 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 baaack 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 the month of December (31 days), 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.

When does it start and end?

It starts on December 1^st at 12:01am ET and will last until December 31^st at 11:59pm ET. So please, make the most of it! But please remember to always follow our Community Guidelines.

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 or even try looking at your Recommended tab.

Thanks for reading,

Here at Yahoo! Answers, we love nothing more than giving you, the community, better ways to share your experience, knowledge and insights.

So, to help you have more fun on Yahoo! Answers we’re pleased to introduce a new event called “AnswerDash”.

What is AnswerDash?

An Answers marathon where you aim to have the most Best Answers on Yahoo! Answers during the 96 hours we are running the event.

How does it work?

1.  Starting Monday, November 26, at 12:01am ET go to Yahoo! Answers and start answering as many questions as you can over the following 4 Days/96Hours

2.  Only answers that are posted within this time frame will be counted as part of the contest.

3.  Be sure to read through the Community Guidelines before you start. No “google it” or “thanks for the 2 points” answers.

4.  The members with the most Best Answers selected during this time frame will qualify for the Prizes

5. By participating in AnswerDash you agree to the Official Rules of the Promotion.

Remember: the more questions you answer, the more chances you have at being selected as Best Answer.

How do you win?

The member who gets the most Best Answers in during the 96 hours that the entry period is open will win prizes. Please remember we will also check the quality of your answers!

It will take the Yamster a few days to count up the numbers (and to measure your quality too!) so we won’t be announcing the winners until Monday, Dec 17 – just in time to make a nice holiday present!

What are the prizes?

One FIRST PLACE winner will receive a Yahoo! Messenger Bag and 1000 points!

One SECOND PLACE winner will receive a Yahoo! Thermos Travel Set and 750 points!

One THIRD PLACE winner will receive a 8 GIG Purple Swivel Drive and 500 points!

Twenty RUNNERS UP will receive 250 points!

Get Answering on November 26 – the clock’s ticking!

Thanks for reading,

*No purchase is necessary to participate in the promotion. The contest is subject to the full Official Rules, so please read them!

If you are using the services of Yahoo! Answers India, then you are contracting with Yahoo! India Private Limited, Unit No. 1261, 6th floor, Building No.12, Solitaire Corporate Park, No. 167, Guru Hargovindji Marg, (Andheri-Ghatkopar Link Road), Andheri (East), Mumbai – 400 093, India, and Yahoo! India provides you with the Contest, and the laws of India govern these Contest Rules regardless of conflict of laws principles. You and Yahoo! India irrevocably consent to the exclusive jurisdiction of the competent courts at Mumbai for all disputes arising out of or relating to these Contest Rules or arising out of or relating to the relationship between you and Yahoo! regardless of the type of claim.

Thank you to those who have been testing our new Answers Ratings feature and providing us with valuable feedback – it’s led to some great insights and some good improvements.

We’ve listened to you and have now included Negative ratings, as it was important to you to flag incorrect or misleading answers effectively.

The new Ratings system includes the choices you asked for, it incorporates our learning, and we believe it improves Answers in both finding and asking information. We trust that it will increase your enjoyment of, and the effectiveness of, our well-loved Answers product.

For the next few weeks, different members will be randomly given one of two following variants

1. Agree, Disagree, Amusing, Useful

or

2. Thumbs Up

Clicking Thumbs up will show the following optional selections

- Agree

- Useful

Thumbs Down

Clicking Thumbs Down will show the following optional selections

- Factually Incorrect (answers that you know are wrong. ex: 2+2=5)

- Incomplete (answers that do not give as much detail as you’d like to see)

- Irrelevant (answers that you feel are not in context of the question)

Clicking Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down will register your rating. Additional selections are purely optional, but at last you get the chance to explain why you are giving the rating. This may aid the answerer in future. When you rate an answer with a Disagree or Thumbs Down that answer will only be hidden to you, however it can still be viewed by other members. Your usage of these will be tracked, to help us decide which combination will be the permanent one. So here’s your chance to move Answers one step closer to how you’d like to see it working.

It is important to note that you can only give one rating to each answer. But you may change your rating if you change your mind. This will remove the old rating and replace it with your new choice. Ratings will not be associated with points. So you will not get any points for rating or for being rated. We want the Ratings to be based on pure merit.

Please take the time to rate the answers so that other members will know which answers of theirs the community thought were fantastic.

Thanks for reading,

Yahoo! Answers Team

We know that as a member of the Answers community, one of the most rewarding and worthwhile experiences is to answer the questions of other members and share your knowledge.

We know that you spend a lot of time looking for questions that pique your interest or that you can relate to and we want to help you to find these questions as quickly as possible. We therefore hope that you will enjoy our new feature – the Question Recommender – which will help you discover questions that suit your knowledge and interests based on your previous activities on Yahoo! Answers.

Soon, these recommendations will start to appear in a new module called “Recommended” which will appear on the home page and category pages. As we are first rolling out a trial version, not all of you will see this immediately. This is our way to test and check that everything is working well. We will eventually roll it out to all English language sites. In the future we plan to extend this feature to other languages as well.

We hope you enjoy finding and using ‘Recommended’ questions.  Please note that it’s early days, and this is a self-improving feature. The tool will evolve and recommendations will update based on questions you choose to answer, so that you will always have a fresh set of options to choose from.

To make sure Yahoo! Answers remains the destination of choice for everyone out there who wants to get the answer to their question or to help other people with their answers, it is important to make sure Answers is a place where high-quality answers are acknowledged.

For the next few weeks, different groups of users will be randomly given one of three different versions of the new ratings. Your usage of these will be tracked, to aid us in deciding which combination will be the permanent one.

While the testing is going on, the old thumbs up/thumbs down will still be around, for those not getting the new feature. They will still be running in the background for everyone, so you may be getting the new ratings but also notice some answers collapsed.

Our new ratings feature will allow you to indicate which answers you think are quality and why you think this is a worthy answer. Replacing thumbs up/thumbs down, you will now be able to choose one of our new ratings types to give to as many answers as you want on the question page.

The options you may see include:

• Informative – Sometimes an answer gives you exactly the facts, the details, the history or science behind a question that was asked. In this case, an informative rating indicates that this answer contained the information required (and often may be an answer that gave excellent information that was above your expectations
• Useful – Some questions ask more for advice than information. A question like “how should you explain a gap year on your CV” or “what should I tell my boyfriend” may not be a great answer because of the information involved, but because the answerer helped through sharing of personal experience or through advice on a given situation.
• Helpful - a cross between Informative and Useful. It covers answers that try to help the asker, without being just advice, but maybe not giving as much detail as you’d like to see.
• Amusing – Although Yahoo! Answers is a place for the sharing of knowledge and experiences, we know that some answers can be amusing in nature and this is fine as long as the answerer is trying to genuinely answer the question. In the case of some great content that also made you laugh, you can rate content as ‘Amusing’
• Agree – Sometimes you want to agree with an answerer’s opinion because it is exactly what you were thinking! In this case, you may find an answer that does not contain a lot of information or advice but contains an opinion that you want to share your agreement with.

It is important to note that you can only give one rating to each answer. Although you may change your rating, note that if you do so that this will remove the old rating from the question when the new one is assigned.

Old Thumbs Up

For old questions that had thumbs up/thumbs down ratings, those ratings will now appear slightly differently. Because we don’t know which rating is a best match, we will now show an answer that had 10 thumbs up as having 10 Agree ratings. Up until now, users could only “agree that content was something they liked” and we don’t know if this was because it was informative, it was helpful or if it was just that they agreed with the opinion.

Therefore, promoting quality questions and answers is a really important. Please take the time to rate the answers that you want to rate so that other users can know which answers of theirs the community thought were fantastic. We will be using these ratings data to better promote the higher quality content in more prominent positions across the site.

The old way of minimizing content that had 5 more thumbs down than thumbs up is obviously now no longer going to happen. We realize this was a bugbear of many users. Although it did hide a lot of poor quality content, it often affected users who wrote opinion-based content that a lot of others disagreed with, rather than necessarily being bad quality in itself.

Points

You do not get any points for rating or for being rated. This is because we want the giving and receiving to be based on merit only. Our goal is to understand which content is the best and to be able to enhance Answers with better promotion of this high quality content over time.

Thanks for reading,

Share YOUR mango memory!

Come mango season and memories come alive of that first luscious bite. We’ve got some great stories of Indians and their mango nostalgia, and we invite you to come join the fun. Take a look at the story so far and share your mango memory with a photograph accompanied by 50-100 words describing your memories right here.

‘Tis the season, after all, to Mango!

http://www.flickr.com/groups/yourpics/

This month (especially) at Yahoo! we’re sending out good vibes to all the fabulous women out there. Happy Women’s Day!
In honour of all the women who makes our lives special, we’ve got some great features lined up:
Krithika Ravi Kumar, a Yahoo! reader, shares a powerful story of choice as she traces a journey across three generations to where it finds her today, a woman of the 21st century, filled with the courage to dream bigger, fly higher.
Switching the spotlight to some of Bollywood’s most deliciously wicked, our favourite editor Vishwas Kulkarni pays respect to a dying breed in the Vanishing act of the vamps.
Our health mag has some great tips for women’s; from the best foods for women, the most dangerous female health habits to keep an eye out for, and some great lessons to learn from your woman.
Women tend to skimp on health to look fabulous, and our editors know that all too well. The world is changing its definition of beauty to embrace health, fitness, and an inner peace that radiates a beauty unmatched by cosmetics. It’s time that women changed their definitions too. So embrace your curves, and find beauty by being fit in body and mind.
If you’re a woman and a traveler, you mustn’t miss our travel special. We’ve got the most woman-friendly travel destinations, the best travel apps, and a whole lot of other goodies lined up to make for an unforgettable holiday.
In real-time news, election 2012 finds that women outvoted men in all the states for the 1st time. Women journos across India tell us the story here.
We’ve come a long way, but we still have miles to go. Nelson Moses serves us a sobering reality check on the skewed gender ratio in India, a hard-hitting piece that leaves us with much to think about.
Here’s hoping that 2012 is a year of change. After all, it boils down to you and me effecting that change in the small acts of kindness and courage that can add up to a movement that sweeps a nation.