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Asked recently in an e-mail message:

Hi Doug,

I was just wondering since my ratio is a lot less due to abandoned questions

Do you have some kind of special method you want to share to get the best answer like only answering the very difficult questions with such a complete answer that they just have to give it a best answer?

Thanks

Michel (newb on Yahoo, veteran on other sites)

This is actually a fairly common question. My Best Answers percentage hovers around 80 percent and has pretty much throughout my participation in Answers. Since the average Level 7 user of Yahoo! Answers has a Best Answers percentage of around 50 percent, my total seems quite high.

However, as Michel notes, circumstances can make your Best Answers percentage much higher — and, not coincidentally, your Answers experience a lot more enjoyable.

Most important, I vote for my own answers.

We can debate until the cows come home whether that should be allowed. Truth is, Answers initially allowed members to vote for their own answers; then didn’t allow it for several months; then allowed it again.

Basically, the entire Answers ranking system requires people to vote for Best Answer. Yahoo! discovered, when they stopped letting people vote for their own answers, that most people don’t care to rank questions they didn’t ask or answer themselves (and even then, they didn’t care much about voting; witness that most questions go to public vote, rather than the author choosing a Best Answer).

That left Yahoo! with many, many unresolved questions. As a practical matter, they needed to reinstate voting for your own answers. Since that’s the case, I do so, and I do so without apology. I provide good answers, so there’s no shame in insisting my answer is best.

Additionally, I rarely answer questions outside Programming & Design, which enjoys a few benefits over other categories:

1. It’s not very active. Therefore, there are fewer answers to compete against.
2. There are demonstrably right & wrong answers to almost every question in P & D. Most other Answers categories elicit questions that ask for opinions (e.g., “Should I ask her out?” “Which is better, a Camaro or a Mustang?”) P & D questions generally ask you to state facts, although there is a fair amount of polling (e.g., “Do you like my Web site?” “Which programming language is best for beginners?”).
3. Because it is not very active, the few people who do vote on questions have significantly more influence on “Best Answer” than voters in other categories. One vote will generally either win you Best Answer outright or break a tie with other answerers. Most of the time, my answers are selected by voters as best, thanks in large part to the reasons listed here.
4. Truth be told, many answerers in P & D don’t know what they are talking about. Since answers can be readily tested, all you basically need to do is get it right before anyone else does, and most questioners or voters will pick your answer as best.

I don’t generally answer poll-type questions or questions asking for an opinion, unless I find the majority of previous answers are nonsense. I don’t answer questions to which I don’t know the answer (I know, that’s shocking: Someone on Answers who only speaks when he knows what he’s talking about).

I am generally very selective about the questions I answer. One of the biggest requirements I filter upon is that the questioner must clearly indicate he is going to understand a correct answer; that is, he can figure out what I am talking about. If the person asks about “codes” or “MySpace” or “diz n dat hehehe”, I’m skipping right by that question.

Aside: I broke this rule last week when some dingbat sent me a question about yuku.com, which is some sort of MySpace knockoff.

I properly answered his question. He voted my answer best. And then, in his rating, he ran his mouth about my stating that social networking sites are a waste of time, claimed that it’s the only effective way to communicate from Iraq, and told me to “watch my tounge next time.”

Which is pretty fucking hilarious, taken in the aggregate. Nonetheless, it reminds me to heed my own advice: Don’t teach pigs to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig. (End of aside)

So in my experience, a high Best Answers percentage boils down to this:

• Answer questions that ask for demonstrably correct answers.
• Provide the first demonstrably correct answer to such questions.
• Don’t answer questions posed by imbeciles.
• Answer questions in a less-active category.
• Vote for your own answers.

And a final tip: I like to view the questions listing by number of answers, not by date asked. (You can sort the questions in a category by clicking on the links above the question list; you can reverse the sort by clicking multiple times).

I sort questions by number of answers descending; that is, I list first questions with no answers. Then I start answering those questions.

Since most users sort questions by date asked, if a question doesn’t get an answer within 20 minutes or so, chances are it will go unanswered and ignored by most people.

Therefore, if you answer such a question, chances are you’re the only person who will answer it — and thus, your odds for Best Answer are pretty much 100 percent.