Why is it that everytime I try to answer a question in geneaology Yahoo! says they are taking a breather?

I've noticed it too - enough so that I now try to CTRL+A to select All, then CTRL+C to copy before I click on "Preview", so I don't lose 10 - 15 minutes of work on an answer.

It happened to me in Community Service at least once. It happens to me in Genealogy quite a bit. Seems to have started after the last revision.

It may have to do with your (and my) exalted status. My "Best Answers" total hasn't gone beyond 1875 for a week or more, although I get one or two a day.

Known new glitches due to updates: "Breather" screen can result from: Percent signs (or other symbols) in q&a, hitting daily limit when answering, posting over 4 links per answer/question, leaving answer screen open for over 3 minutes. Also the + sign is 'eaten' in questions, question may have been deleted, you may be blocked by ther person, posting the same link repeatedly, etc.

Possible fixes: Eliminate the symbols, shorten the answer, wait until after midnight Pacific time (for daily limit issue), click BACK & try again, click F5 & try again, clear your cache & reboot, post a short answer & update with the longer answer (Warning: this may earn you a ‘placeholding’ violation, though!), remove links, go to another English site, another category, be patient.

It's not just with Y!A.

I tried to send a mass e-mail to 15 people, 5 times today, and got the "breather" notice, every single time!

That is SO frustrating, I've gotten it a lot lately, too!

I found a previous Yahoo!Answer that gave me the answer to why it kept happening to me, and I hope this will help you.

It has to do with the content of your answer. Either:

a) you have a character they don't allow, or

b) you've provided a source URL that is VERY common (it happened to me recently when providing Wikipedia as a source to one of my Genealogy answers). I've found that if I change the source URL by putting "(dot)" instead of "." then my answer will be submitted.

For example: put "ancestry(dot)com" rather than "ancestry.com".

I hope that helps!

It happens to me, too. Last night I tried to submit an answer TWICE, and lost the information because I got the "breather" response, or the "page couldn't be found." So, the next time when I couldn't refresh the page, I minimized one window and opened another, and it worked fine. What's going on???

If they are taking a breather, then they have COPD or something, cause it isn't just you. I don't write short answers, so when I lost 3 of them today, I got disgruntled. And no, only one of them had a link.

Yes, use of the percentage sign always does this.

(And I thought it was The Famous Family curse put upon my family when they had a run-in with The Mighty Yamster back in 1648. Maybe we should still compare surname lists in our family trees to determine who the culprit was...)

I KNOW it sucks. I have a question I want to ask dammit.

And the stupid spell check and popups on the side are VERY annoying

I can answer questions but it won't let me ask a question. This sucks!

I'll be back in a minute. I'm taking a breather.

If you have a percentage sign in your answer, take it out. It's a bug. I wonder if the Yahoo people know about it?