Yahoo Answers is a totally free community where you can post questions in almost any catagory you require assistance in. You can also help other YA posters out by answering questions that you may have some experience in.

It is similar to the request section here at Hubs, except, it is a less formal type of posting, just as if it were a forum. There is no limit to the information you can find on YA. While some of the information will be of excellent quality, you will also have the spammers and people who are just out to get the 2 points they earn when they answer, things lik IDK (I don't know).

There is a point system that collects points for each question/answer that you post and the more points you receive the higher the level you achieve. The higher the level, the more you can post and email other users.

I have been posting on YA for about 6 months or so and I enjoy it now and then. The main thing to remember is that sometimes people can get ugly, just as in any forum or social site, so you should try not to let things get to you very easily.

As with HP, you have a thumbs up, thumbs down, rate button and a report button. This is to allow the users to help in rating the good questions and answers as well as reporting spam in the postings, which there is an abundance of. There is also a voting page that you can vote for a best answer after the question has been posted for a certain length of time. If your answer is chosen as best answer, you get an extra 10 points.

While these are excellent features, you also have the abusers of those features. We call them trolls because they will just go in and report your question or answer as spam just because they don't agree with you. If you are added to their friends list, they can follow any post you make and mark them all, which causes problems. However, if this gets to be a problem, you can simply go into your profile settings and make your network private so no one else will be able to see a list of all your postings on your prfile page. This will help considerably if you have a problem with the trolls.

It can be a very fun place to go and also very helpful as there are so many members in different time zones that it normally doesn't take long to start getting responses to your questions, as long as they are honest, quality questions.