Yahoo! Answers New Zealand Blog

Photo by Dricker94.

Welcome to our new and hopefully regular blog segment!

What is Five on Friday?

Well it’s where we feature 5 questions from the week. They can be resolved and we feature the best answer as well, they could be really great open questions that need some good answers or they can be questions where you need the community’s help to decide on the best answer. If your question is chosen to be featured, you will receive 50 points!

What sort of questions do we want?

Well, we are pretty open to the sorts of questions we feature here. We’d obviously love to see our New Zealand users get involved, but if you are from somewhere else in the world and found a really awesome question in your travels across Answers, don’t be shy! The only thing we ask is that they be clean, worthy of sharing and don’t contravene the Yahoo!Xtra Terms of Service or our Community Guidelines. Feel free to submit as many as you want!

How do they get chosen?

Well, on Friday morning, the Answers team will sort through all the submissions from that week and decide upon the best 5 to feature.

How do we submit questions?

Submit your questions by sending me an email at y_answrs_team_nz@yahoo.co.nz with a subject of “Five on Friday”!

So get cracking and submit those questions to me, either on the email above or by leaving a comment below

Kate
Community Manager

You may have noticed we have added a little bit of colour 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.

You’re newly engaged and the whole world seems fresh and exciting, until someone brings up the inevitable questions – Are you having an engagement party? Have you set a date yet? How long will you be engaged for?

Before long, that glow is replaced by an overpowering urge to snap at the next person that asks. Am I alone in this?

My other half proposed back in September and we recently held our engagement party, attended by our families and close friends. It was a fantastic night spent with the people we love. We did it on a budget with everyone pitching in, but it was just as lovely as it would have been if we had spent thousands. The biggest question on everyone’s lips was around the potential date even though we’d been formally engaged for just over a month! We pre-empted a lot of this by booking the church and venue just a few weeks ago, although we’re not planning to get married until late next year, so we were able to let them all know to lock the date in.

And the offerings of advice! Suddenly everyone else is an expert on what you want, how you should do things and what you should be wearing. Whilst suggestions from family and friends that know you is welcomed, it’s the ones from random strangers and people you barely know as a friend-of-a-friend that really get me.

So I’ve decided to take the laidback approach for the time being. I already have the church and reception booked. I also got the dress organised early on thus disappointing my scores of friends and relatives who’d love nothing better than dragging me out to try dresses on, sorry ladies!

Here are some other questions that I found to be extremely useful:

• What type of gift do you give for an engagement party?
• Is it OK to have an engagement party if no wedding is planned?
• What do you think is a reasonable budget for an engagement ring?
• What is the difference between a wedding ring and an engagement ring?
• What kind of decorations are appropriate for an engagement party?
• What is the best way to word a engagement announcement?
• Can you invite people to an engagement party but not the wedding?
• How long should a couple be engaged before getting married?

Do you have an engagement experience you’d like to share? Or maybe you have some advice for me! Leave a comment below.

Kate
Community Manager

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.

Have you ever wondered, “If only I had an easier way to find answers for my questions when I’m out and about.” Now, the wait is officially over!

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!Xtra Answers is now available on-the-go.

Will it work on my phone?
The new mobile-optimised version of Yahoo!Xtra 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…

Yahoo! Answers Goes Mobile @ Yahoo!7 Video

What does it do?
With Yahoo!Xtra Answers optimised 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!Xtra Answers as we are. Give it a try today!

Today we have a special treat for you, a blog post written by the Yahoo! India Answers CM – Bhumika, with a very important message for October!

Photo by merfam.

October is the month of the pink ribbon.

In fact, I myself have worn the pink ribbon proudly as I know many women who have been afflicted with breast cancer. Some of them bounced back to life after surgery or treatment and a few others succumbed to the disease.

So when I decided to write a blog post about breast cancer, I was absolutely certain that it would take me less than ten minutes to do so. After all, I knew stories about all these women. And I thought I was mighty pink because as a woman I knew how to protect myself. Right?

Wrong. As I started to write this post, I realised how little I actually knew about this deadly disease though it had touched my life often enough, albeit indirectly.

Worldwide, breast cancer comprises 10.4% of all cancer incidences among women, making it the most common type of non-skin cancer in women and the fifth most common cause of cancer death. This explains the number of awareness campaigns about breast cancer during the month of October.

And yet I was finding it difficult to write about breast cancer. So I decided to take a look at Answers.

It was no surprise that I found a list of commonly asked questions about breast cancer. I decided to post these questions so it could help women and men like me who know about breast cancer but are hardly aware of the facts relating to the disease.

Six links to save a life!
Understand this cancer better so you can treat it on time if need be!

• How does breast cancer develop in women and what are the preventive measures for it?
• What are the symptoms of breast cancer and what are the consequences?
• What kind of tests or examinations should be done for breast cancer?
• Do people with breast cancer have to get their breasts cut off?
• How long can you live with untreated breast cancer and have no symptoms?
• How common is it to get breast cancer when you are a teenager?

Four typical doubts about preventing and treating breast cancer:

• Is it true that deodorants can cause breast cancer in women?
• Can I get breast cancer if I sleep wearing my bra?
• Are there any Ayurvedic treatments for breast cancer?
• How exactly does breast feeding lower the risk of breast cancer?

Other useful links to understand breast cancer better:

• I may have breast cancer, what questions should I ask my doctor?
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer

And here’s how you can help people with breast cancer.

So do you have a breast cancer story? Is there some knowledge about breast cancer you would like to share? Do send us your story (y_answrs_team_nz at yahoo.co.nz) or leave us a comment.

Go pink!

Bhumika
Community Manager – India

Many of you have topics close to your heart that you like to answer questions for on a regular basis.

My Saved Search is a great solution that helps you quickly find new questions on these specialist 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!Xtra 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!Xtra 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.