Site operation
Yahoo! Answers allowed any questions that did not violate Yahoo! Answers community guidelines.[28] To encourage good answers, helpful participants were occasionally featured on the Yahoo! Answers Blog. Though the service itself was free, the contents of the answers were owned by the respective users; Yahoo! maintains a non-exclusive and royalty-free worldwide right to publish the information.[29] Chat was explicitly forbidden in the Community Guidelines, although categories like Politics and Religion & Spirituality were mostly opinion.[30] Users could also choose to reveal their Yahoo! Messenger ID on their Answers profile page.
Misuse of Yahoo! Answers was handled by a user moderation system, where users reported posts that were in breach of guidelines or the Terms of Service. Posts were removed if they received a sufficient weight of trusted reports (reports from users that had a reliable reporting history). Deletion could be appealed: an unsuccessful appeal received a 10-point penalty; a successful one reinstated the post and reduced the 'trust rating' (reporting power) of the reporter(s). If a user received a large number of violations in a relatively short amount of time or a very serious violation, it could cause the abuser's account to be suspended. In extreme (but rare) cases (for a Terms of Service violation), the abuser's entire Yahoo! ID could be suddenly deactivated without warning.
To open an account, a user needed a Yahoo! ID but could use any name as identification on Yahoo! Answers. A user could be represented by a picture from various internet avatar sites or a user-made graphic uploaded to replace their default Yahoo graphic. Yahoo! Avatars was discontinued in 2012. When answering a question, a user could search Yahoo! or Wikipedia, or any source the user wished, as long as they mentioned their source.
Questions were initially open to answers for four days, and the question's asker could choose to pick a best answer for the question after a minimum of one hour. However, comments and answers could still be posted after this time.[31] To ask a question, one had to have a Yahoo! account with a positive score balance of five points or more.
The points system was weighted to encourage users to answer questions and to limit spam questions. There were also levels (with point thresholds), which gave more site access.[32] Points and levels had no real world value, could not be traded, and served only to indicate how active a user had been on the site. A notable downside to the points/level system was that it encouraged people to answer questions even when they did not have a suitable answer to give to gain points. Users also received ten points for contributing the "Best Answer" which was selected by the question's asker. The voting function, which allowed users to vote for the answer they considered best, was discontinued in April 2014.
In addition to points awarded for activity,[32] Yahoo! Answers staff could also have awarded extra points if they were impressed with a user's contributions.[33] The Yahoo! Answers community manager has said "power users" who defend the company should be thanked and rewarded.[34]
