There's some invisible moderators that are always watching the questions come in 24/7, they're the ones who decide what questions get their tip removed.

Oh and if you really want to know more I'd recommend emailing them at contact@mahalo.com for direct contact with the Mahalo staff.
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Oh come on you say you don't know why they removed the tip from Who framed Roger Rabbit? I mean it doesn't even take a complete goggle search to find the answer.

What is java? You can't even answer that one properly. Is it the island/land, the beverage, or the programming language?

They are just trying to protect the system from people asking either two easy a question and inflating payouts or questions that could have been answered by doing a search on Mahalo.

That's my opinion.
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I am personally of the opinion that no question is stupid and not all people have the same level of interest in looking up answers. I don’t tend to look at the tips offered when I reply to questions. I see a question I think is interesting and can address or a question I don’t know the answer to myself then I answer it. Take the question “what is purim?” question for instance. I saw that question and I did not know what it was and did a brief search on it and came up with an answer. My goal was to help educate the person asking and in the process myself. I can recall a person saying something to the effect that people asking questions via email are often on devices like phones and are just looking for a quick answer. If this is the case then why should a person not be tipped for doing a search for a person unable or unwilling to do one themselves? Repetitive questions could become a concern and perhaps there should be some kind of Mahalo Answers FAQ section indexed for fast browsing on portable devices. That is assuming there is not already one in place.

If I was to use the question “what is Purim?” again as an example… A person emailed in the question and two people replied to the question at basically the same time drawing from two separate sources. This validates the accuracy of the information for the person asking.

The question “Who framed Rodger Rabbit?” was asked it could be for any reason not just being silly. The person asking might actually want to know who framed Rodger Rabbit… the answer is of course the Judge. However he person might not know that. They could no have the desire and or time to do an internet search for the information but still want an answer. Why then should the person doing the search not be tipped? Is it because a person arbitrarily decided that it was not worthy as a question and the person searching was not worthy to be tipped? Hmm. That is about all I have to say on that.
Source(s):
internal focus group... I was talking to me... no not you the other me...o_O

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You're bringing up a good topic of discussion here Karj, so kudos to you for that, but I don't quite agree with your point. While the first two questions you mention shouldn't be funded with a $1 of Mahalo money(I totally agree), I find it contradicting to say, that the ones'(that you mentioned) that were stripped of the $1 were anymore worthy. Maybe I'm missing something here, but I'm just looking at the criteria of the words, and the way they relate to their relevance over the whole internet. Straight to point: In whatever context one would want an answer to "who framed..", couldn't you get that answer because you, yourself know what your specifically looking for? Or, are you looking for more exaggerated, or creative answers, in which case, that's a whole-nother ballgame. Haha. And why I don't question "seemingly" over-simplified questions.

On a different note, I think the moderators should look at a question and arbitrarily judge how much a Mahalo funded ??? is worth and just slap .50, .75, 25 cents, or whatever. If it's a really easy question to answer, then it should be answered based on its worth.
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There is no real science to it, as one of the moderators who has the option of removing tips I can assure you as of now its at the discretion of the moderator on duty. Personally I don't remove tips if there are already several answers on the question and I only remove tips if the question is what I feel as being silly/super easy. With new people discovering Twitter we are still seeing questions like "Why is the Sky blue?" or "Who framed roger rabbit?"

With that being said, in six days, out of hundreds of questions I've removed less then 10 tips in that time.

You still get points for answering these questions, but if we spot it in time, your most likely not going to see a crisp dollar bill attached to it. Again, there is no science, its at the discretion of the mods.

Remember this is only a 10 day test. Mahalo funded M$1 questions could be removed from the system within four days if we find there are too many problems or that it's not helping us get great answers so... That's certainly something to keep in mind. If we do keep them I promise as mods we'll try our best to be more consistent with our tip removals.

If you missed the introduction thread it's here.
http://www.mahalo.com/answers/mahalo-answers-community/new-featuretest-m1-tips-are-up-some-notes-about-the-10-day-test
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1. They SHOULD, but they aren't - they are legitimate questions, and thus are worth $1.

2. You're forgetting - these questions were asked by email and Twitter, and we might have reason to assume that the person asking the questions is on a mobile phone, thus having no access to Google or Wikipedia.

3. These questions are legitimate, just as legitimate as any other question (like, for example, this one.) Plus, I could not understand what you are talking about.

For the removed tips:
The Roger Rabbit one is obvious spam, and the Java one is just too simple. (As Mahalo said, if something is uber simple they might take the tip down.)
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