This article defines the term "chatting."

Yahoo! Answers is a question-and-answer community of people sharing knowledge. We provide a couple of different ways for members to connect with one another, including email, instant message, and a comments area, so chatting in questions and answers is not allowed. When people use Answers to chat with each other, it lowers the quality of the site and inhibits knowledge-sharing.

Yahoo! Answers is not meant to be about gaming or playing a game, it is about sharing knowledge with other Yahoo! users across the world and, for this reason, questions involving gaming are not allowed.

Here are a few examples of what we consider chatting:

• How (are you, old are you, was your day, is everyone today)?
• What are you/What am I (doing, thinking of, wearing, etc.)?
• Guess my/Can you guess my/What's your (name, age, sex, weight, birthday, location, etc.)?
• Who is from…/Who plays …here/Who wants to chat
• Do you like my (avatar, web site, poem, etc.)?*
• Who wants to celebrate my birthday, drivers license, first 100 points, level 7?
• Where is user (nickname) gone?
• Avatar games and games of any nature

We also consider questions that call out other users by name to be chatting. If the intent is to ask a follow-up question in response to someone else's question and that person is not available via email or IM, post a new question that's open to everyone in the community to answer -- there might be someone else who's better equipped to answer it.

Note: Exceptions to this rule would have to satisfy two criteria: The question would have to be 1) advice-seeking and 2) knowledge-worthy. For example, it would be OK to ask "How can I improve my poem?" or "How do I make my avatar look more attractive?"