Yahoo! Answers – error 999

I was messing about on Yahoo! Answers earlier and received an error 999 when I tried to post a response. The advice given infers that my IP address was being used for spam or that I had a virus. Yahoo! told me to run a virus scan or contact my ISP for help (yeah, right).

Kicking the router to give me a new IP address didn’t work, and as I’m running Ubuntu the chance of having a virus or anything is somewhat remote. After some digging, I found that Yahoo! also use error 999 as a cover for spam-protection of a sort. As well as checking IP address, they also prevent multiple posting of web addresses. I’ve seen this on Answers before, where some ****** posts the same URL to multiple non-related questions.

Thing is, my reply didn’t have any URLs in it. One page advised me to split my response into sections. Post one paragraph, then edit my answer to add the next and so on.

What do you know, it worked. And since doing it, I’ve not had the same issue on any further questions. It sounds like a fault in their spam parsing software, but at least there seems to be a simple way around it.