Yahoo Anwers Being Switched Off

[Sunk]

Ab Editor FYI

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/yahoo-answers-shutting-down-when-b1827172.html

[pastafreak]

I remember joining that when I first got internet access around 2007. I also joined AB then. I quickly fell out of love with Yahoo because it was totally worthless as a q and a site. Can't remember the last time I even looked in.

[AB Editor]

Hi Sunk, yes, I saw this! I was wondering if ABers use Yahoo Answers at all and whether it will be missed.

[brainiac]

For many years I havehad a 'spare' Yahoo email address which I occasionally use, but I have never used Yahoo answers - wasn't aware it existed!

[emmie]

i used them years ago.

[bookbinder]

I use YA, but only to answer questions. I have visited it many times over the years, and the layout was better many years ago. There was more room to give an answer, then. I shan't miss it when it shuts down on May 24.

[jno]

conspiracy theories and racism? No wonder it's closing. Goodness knows where its users will go.

[JJ109]

I enjoyed it in its early days, very similar to AB. I had 20,000 best answers, so you can see I was on it a lot. However, it then changed when they amalgamated the UK version with the "All English speaking countries version" and at the same time they stopped moderation.

After that it was dominated by US pre-teens being foul mouthed and messing around, and it lost my interest entirely. I haven't been on it for many many years.

[The Builder]

Never posted on it, but poked about many times.
There's a current thread on it, asking for alternatives to Yahoo Answers. The popular vote seems to be for Quora.
The trouble with Quora is the interface. It's a little haphazard, with little or no proper "search" facility.

ED... I think you should set up a "Joe Bloggs" account on YA and suggest The Answerbank. There's sadly no mention of it on there.

[anneasquith]

It was ok until the young ones took it over :-)

[Bobbisox1]

Sky is my IP and they use Yahoo as their email platform, you have to ‘pay’ to stop the irritating ads popping up in your email

[Buenchico]

Yahoo answers is/was a US-based site. (It could be accessed though a .co.uk web address but visitors still ended up on the main US site). Like the vast majority of general Q & A forums, it suffered from a lack of proper moderation and was thus full of posts from trolls and spammers.

Answerbag.com is/was a similar, US-based, site. It got so full of spam and troll posts that its owners closed it down. However it was then bought by a different company, who promised that things would be a lot different. They weren't.

Several other Q & A websites have closed down because of similar problems.

Before any Q & A sites ever existed, in the very earliest days of the internet, there was Usenet (which was separate to the World Wise Web), where anyone could create a forum for a topic of their choice. For example, there was a forum for owners of English Setters and another one for discussing Radio 4. However the system was entirely unmoderated, eventually meaning that for every one post on a forum about, say, traction engines, there were over a thousand posts advertising sex sites, etc. So Usenet fell into disuse.

Other sites have fallen by the wayside because they weren't adequately moderated. (e.g. Sagazone, which had the funding of the massive Saga group behind it, was meant to be a discussion forum for people over 50 but it ended up full of troll posts from right-wing extremists).

At the moment there are very few 'general' Q & A sites available anywhere in the world. Quora seems to run well, although it's not as user-friendly as The Answerbank is. StackExchange is hard to navigate, with its most active sections being those devoted to computer technology (while others are hardly used) but it appears to be well run.

There are also plenty of other well-run forums dedicated to specific subjects (such as web design) but good general Q & A websites are hard to find!