I haven't worked at Yahoo in years, but I'd be very surprised if they shut down Answers. It was the most successful new product launch they had in a very long time, and it looks like it's still thriving today (take a look at the Answers homepage - there are several new questions being posted per minute!)

Compare to the products mentioned in the blog post, most if which I hadn't even heard of. Why would Yahoo continue to run a message board product when they also have the much more popular Yahoo Groups?

I'm guessing it is sticking around. The text in the Yahoo Message Board section says:

"We also encourage you to ask and answer questions on Yahoo! Answers, and discuss issues in the comments section on Yahoo! News."

However, it looks like the avatar images that everyone is used to will disappear, since Yahoo is getting rid of them generally.

I hope they do close it - its useless unless you are dredging for comedy.

Citation for the downvoters: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110910190628AA...

It maybe useless to you or me, but its very much active and used by a lot of people. I think this is one of the few Yahoo Services that organically grew over time and started having a name for itself.

I do think there is plenty of room to make it much much better. It looks the same for as long as I can remember.

Would be driving tons of traffic to yahoo, it has great SEO on all kinds of questions. If anything they should double down on it and try and attract higher quality answers. Stack exchange is showing there is a pretty big opportunity in questions and answers.

it says specifically in the article that it is staying