What is considered “chat”?
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.
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.)?
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.
