This isn’t nearly as serious as having a car’s wheels fall off while a prospective buyer takes a test drive. Still, even as Microsoft tries to push Yahoo into a sale, links within questions and responses on Yahoo Answers have ceased working.
The good news: the dead links aren’t a fresh feature (it seemed possible that this was an attempt to cut down on spam- and malware-related stuff). On the Yahoo Answers Blog, “Lou” stated, “We are working to fix the problem and we don’t yet have an estimate on when it will be done. Sorry for the inconvenience – we will keep you posted.”
Unfortunately, Lou wrote that yesterday afternoon (hat tip to Barry Schwartz for covering it very early this morning), and user-provided links within Yahoo Answers still don’t work. Many folks weren’t too fond of these live links, anyway – think of the spam- and malware-related issues mentioned a moment ago – but others are unhappy about what happened.
“People A” wrote, “I had a lot of good link lists to resolved question best answer links are disabled. It is too bad and may cause a lot of people to leave YA. Some information is difficult to find and links are a good source of information sometimes.”
We can’t, in all seriousness, suggest that this issue will have any impact on the Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition (and Microsoft’s falling stock price is effectively lowering its offer, anyway). Yet the problem makes Yahoo look all the more pathetic, and that’s one area in which the company didn’t need any help.
