Yahoo! Answers New Zealand Blog

Photo by Nina Matthews Photograpy.

Just a quick message to wish you all a very safe and merry Christmas and holiday season!

My Christmas will be spent with my fiance and family. I am particlarly looking forward to my baby niece’s first Christmas! What do you have planned?

Leave a comment below and have a fantastic holiday!

Kate
Community Manager

Head over to the Yahoo! Answers blog and check out the latest episode of Answers on the Street, an initiative by our team over in the United States of America.

Think you have a better answer? Let us know by answering the following question:

How do you get rid of the hiccups?
- Yahoo! Answers Team

Kate
Community Manager

Today is National Jandal Day in New Zealand!

What is National Jandal Day?

On December 3rd each year, wear your jandals to work and pledge a donation to Surf Life Saving New Zealand.

The donations go towards supporting your local Surf Lifeguards and help them keep beaches safe during the summer.

What are jandals?

Well, if you’re an Aussie like me, you would know them as thongs! In other countries, they are known as flip flops or by a popular Brazilian brand “Havaianas” or “Havs” for short . And thanks to Jiffy Feet, we know they are great to wear if you plan on getting your feet wet, such as to the beach or washing the car. Definitely a versatile piece of footwear!

Surf Life Saving CEO, Grant Florence, noted they raised over $50,000 last year and hopes Kiwis will dig deep this year.

“We save lives on the beach, we volunteer more than 195,000 hours a year and money and donations provided to us helps us make the beaches safer.”

If you’d like to donate to such a worthy cause, head to over to Surf Live Saving New Zealand. Every little bit counts!

Kate
Community Manager

We’ve made a few minor changes and bug fixes this week to both the desktop and mobile versions of Answers which we wanted to let you know about.

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:

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’re keen to hear your feedback on these changes and what you’d like to see on Answers. Leave a comment below or visit the Suggestion Board.

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

‘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!Xtra 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!Xtra Answers, especially to move up through the levels. But we also know it can feel pretty slow 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 1^st 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 below!

Kate
Community Manager