Yedda needs more moderators to screen this stuff out before it joins the general feed.  Tiptopmanager used to be one of the premier answerers here, and when he feels frustrated you know that something is wrong.  These partner sites and AOL are the source of all this drek, and they never screen their input at all.  Many sites seem to advertise this as their "contact us" and try to get free customer service from us for their products/sites (plus royalties from Yedda for doing it).

   drabsv, have you backtracked the tab on a Web4Health question?  They advertise "a team of experts selected by the Commission of the European Communities" on the page you submit your question on.  If you dig into their site pages deep, you find the disclaimer that their experts "may" answer your questions but they are really answered by the Yedda community.  but not on the front page.  There we are experts in psychology and medicine.

   And the celebrity fan mail.  Why is that stuff coming here?  I can understand people wanting us to do their work and all their web searches for them for free, that is just human greed and laziness.  But fan mail?  Do they really want us to pretend to be these people?

    Yedda is trying to be too many things to too many people.  Maybe they should have a button for choices   1) I want a real answer or 2) I want someone to just agree with me or 3) I'm looking for a sucker.  Then we could pick the feed we want to see.   I also would like a "share a laugh with a friend about this question" link for the really bizarre ones.

   Is it springtime in Bulgaria yet?

   So, what do you want to do about this problem?  Beyond more moderators either at the partner sites or Yedda I don't really have any ideas.  Language recognition programs to screen out stuff probably wouldn't be practical since not everything is in English.

   I'm pretty sure that most the quetions that bother you come from the U.S.  I guess I should explain that our educational system, and schools in general have gone downhill in recent generations.  Our literacy rate has fallen significantly.  I quit looking when it dropped below 70% years ago.  A lot of the children (hundreds of thousands at least) are almost feral as far as being socialized into mainstream culture and mores.  The majority of questions on Yedda are written at a pretty high level for us in the US.  A lot of colleges now require a writing test to graduate to spare themselves the embarassment of graduating illiterates, but I think they may be in the  minority.

   What we can do about this, I don't have a clue.  Maybe we could have a literacy test in order to post a question, but I don't think this site would be cool with that.  It does seem more and more that a spin-off site should be created for the educated/intellectuals to hang around in, the way Yedda seemed a long time ago, but this isn't right either.

   If we had moderators/someone who reads every question on behalf of the site they could rank the questions as they are asked and we could view feeds that block certain rankings.  i.e.  elementary level, social level, college level, expert level.  Anything not written as a clear question could be marked and avoided.

   But again, this all boils down to Yedda having a staff paying attention to what is being posted as it is posted, or being the gateway to allow it to be posted.  I understand the philosophy of being hands off and allowing everybody to say what they want, but that makes it really hard to surf for relevant or real questions or answers.