The Stealing on Yahoo Answers

The: 20/08/2008 - AT: 2:29

Particularly the stealing of Best Answers, far to often the asker choses the wrong answer for whatever reason.

I got quite a few examples which annoys me, YA is more a way to increase my existing knowledge. But it has also poven to be a nice way to bring in some traffic to my website, even though YA is abusing the nofollow tags on any links, no matter their relevancy.

Irritating Users on YA

Most of the time its just stupid teenagers, who care little about which answer they chose as the best, i bet they chose them randomly.

First Question

The first answer I'm going to mention is titled What program can i use to make a social network website without all the coding? Of cause i could have avoided the question easily, the outcome of answering questions with little or no-content, let alone Askers who try to avoid coding, is rarely a best-answer.

This just "JR" basically just re-stated everything from my question, in a more messy way. But maybe the asker got confused about his "source text" which states Pro web2.0 application designer at web2coders.com, he seam to include this text in all hes answers, like it has some sort of special meaning.

He didn't even bother to insert a few linebreaks, and hes constantly using caps combined with linebreaks, and lots of dots....

Second Question

Here is another one named What should my major be for Web Design?, Answered by the same user, in the same best-answer hungering way. Note this one is also copying/re-stating some of which i already posted, and is even inaccurate, nevertheless the asker still desides to chose his answer as the best.

Third Question

The Second is titled How Do I Keep My HTML tags in Tag Form?, i dont know what the asker was thinking, not only is my answer going much more in depth, but the answer chosen as the best is also using the deprecated xmp element.

Final Question

This will be the final question I'm going to share today, someone asks the following Does anyone have the code for a scroll bar that goes sideways?, the answer chosen as the best is incorrectly using tables for layout, and is much more complicated then the answer i posted. This again reflect that myspace must be filled with all sorts of invalid code, what a mess.

Comments: [2]

Author: BlueBoden

Poster: just JR

Date: 01/09/2008 - 13:07

Found your blog on an unexpected link...

When you directly contacted me to complain of my "copy" of your answer, I tried to reply, but your ID in YA! does not allow email. This is a very arrogant attitude. When you insult someone, at least, allow them to respond in kind.

I did not even SEE your answers, and I don't care to see them either!

Unlike you, I am not cheating on YA... 81% BAs is impossible to achieve otherwise. (I know my maths' statistics).

Now, if you make a blog to complain about something as trivial as Yahoo Answers, THIS tells me what you are really worth...

Not my best regards,

Just JR

Poster: BlueBoden

Date: 01/09/2008 - 17:03

I manually activated the above comment, since a fake email address "none@nowhere.com" was provided, email addresses ain't kept in the system at all, so there is no reason to use a fake email, actually the email in the system is just a hashed string used when confirming your posts. I only noticed the comment because i didn't disable my catch-all address yet.

Normally i wouldn't do this, but everyone should have the opportunity to defend them self. And i don't know if he will make another attempt, so this is more to show viewers the answer he made, despite my email being available directly from my blog, and Brugbart, he still chose to post his answer here, which perhaps is to the better.

And i presume you will read this at some point, perhaps i was frustrated, and wasn't clear enough about the case. I've seen a lot of people on answers use some meaningless source text, in your case "Pro web2.0 application designer at web2coders.com", (which might be perfectly justified), but the problem is that people feel pushed as selecting such answers as the best, simply because they think whoever made the answer is someone "professional", or with a reasonable amount of experience, which I'm sure to rarely be the case.

I've seen to much of that, and those answers have been some of the most lacking, and poor answers I've seen. If those people really are as professional as they claim, why not provide some more in-depth answers?