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:
Choose Best Answer, Edit Answer & Additional details pages
We’ve updated these pages to our new look and feel that you see when asking or answering. By improving the code behind these pages too this should resolve some of the issues that occasionally occurred with special characters and text wrapping.
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’d love to hear your feedback on these changes and what you’d like to see on Answers.