[Ken Leung]

I thought the Yahoo! board is a good addition to this year's question answering process. Before, teams have to e-mail questions to FIRST, and only the team asking the question will get an immediate respond. Other teams have to wait till team updates to come out.

Mean while, because the other teams aren’t aware that some questions were asked already, they will send the same questions to FIRST. FIRST used to be flooded with the similar topic questions that way in the past years.

But teams still post similar questions anyway, which is why FIRST need a good amount of people to answer questions. Reducing the people working on it will only make it worse, and slow down the answering process.

With the Yahoo! board, FIRST can now answer questions and publish the ruling ASAP, reducing the amount of similar questions, and let every team know the answer right away.

Sure, the volume of questions is overwhelming. But that's always the same with or without the Yahoo Board. Teams will e-mail the questions to FIRST anyway. The board is a better way for FIRST to organize the questions and for people within FIRST to know which questions have been answered by another person. AND the board has a nice feature of searching through the threads, making it easier for teams to look up answers or posts.

So I think it's a really good improvement to the answering process... As for whether it can be better or not, I will leave that up to you.