Detect edits to add [SOLVED] or [RESOLVED] to the title and direct the user to add an answer

Question

Users often ask questions that they answer for themselves. Good for them. And good for us.

Symptom

The correct procedure seems to be:

1. Write new answer to own question
2. Wait two days
3. Accept own answer

The incorrect, but fairly popular, procedure seems to be:

1. Edit the question to include the solution
2. Put "[SOLVED] or [RESOLVED]" in the title

Proposed solution

Users should be warned when using the word "solved", delimited in any way, in a question title. This could be "[SOLVED]", "(solved)", or even "Solved - ". I imagine this:

1. The user tries to submit an edit that adds "solved" such that the word "solved is delimited. The user is brought to a warning page.
2. If the only edit to the question was appending new lines (such as adding an "edit:" paragraph), that edit is copied into a text box

3. The page mentioned in 1 is shown as follows:

   $StackSite marks questions as answered when you accept an answer. You can accept an answer by clicking the green check mark next to that answer. There's no need to put "SOLVED" or "RESOLVED" in the title!

   Are you answering your own question?

   Create a proper answer to your question:

   1. Move your edit to a new answer.
   2. Write your answer.
   3. If nobody writes a more correct or thorough answer after two days, come back and accept your answer.

   By doing this, you remove your question from the Unanswered Questions list. You also allow other $StackSite users to vote your answer up. Thanks for helping out!

   TEXT BOX WITH EDITS GOES HERE, FOLLOWED BY "POST YOUR ANSWER" BUTTON

   Not answering your own question?

   Sorry for slowing you down.

   OVERVIEW OF EDIT, FOLLOWED BY "SAVE EDITS" BUTTON

Discussion

This would likely reduce the number of [RE]SOLVED questions that appear. However, it's unclear whether this should be a community moderation issue or a feature request issue. The increased engineering work required in building in the interstitial page is probably quite nontrivial, whereas this type of question makes up well under 453 questions.

Note: Google also provides a bit better results.

Answer 1

This sounds like a great idea, but I think if there was to be an actual system it should be a mix of 2 things:

• Automatic recommendation. This should be for all the common cases you described. But this will leave quite a number of false positives/false negatives. Not to mention a lot of people will probably not even bother reading the warning message.
• Flag that could be at the same level as other flags, where users would be able to tell that this looks suspiciously like a solved answer, and a mod could take action.

The reasons for the mix of these 2 is that, after browsing a bit in the search, there seems to be a great diversity and creativity in the way people mark something as solved, and an efficient system would need to find a good compromise between false negatives and false positives. If we just add a warning, I get the feeling that a lot of people will keep doing it, there needs to be a way to take action if we really want to go that way.

False negatives: There is still a certain number of posts who would be non-detected by a script but easily by humans (assuming we want to avoid too many false positives). Some examples of posts who would be hard to catch:

• SOLVED at the end, no delimiter
• solved but still puzzled
• SOLVED at the beginning, no delimiter
• Actual sentence could make sense if you don't look at the upper case
• solved myself
• commas can be used for anything
• SOVLED and not SOLVED
• What about a C++ class called Solved?

False positives:

• Typo and a separator, but actually just a class name
• solved after a comma and before a question mark
• not solved !

In summary, I think the automatic system should be very basic otherwise this will end of flagging too much stuff, you'd need to do some kind of AI to have a reasonable algorithm and I don't think it's worth the effort. People will do a much better job at flagging those. But overall that's a pretty minor issue if you look at the number of "solved" posts, and a lot of headache for not that much impact.