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Lots of questions are very generic, "share an experience" kinds of questions.

In these cases, I am quite often interested in specific answers that may not have gotten that many upvotes.

These questions also tend to elicit lots of responses, so going back to find the answers I'm interested in somewhere in the middle of a sea of responses is a pain.

Is there a way to favorite or bookmark these answers?

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8
  • A link link was recently added to all answers. Perhaps just today. I just noticed it for the first time a few minutes before I read this question. See Olafur's answer: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1569/…
    – raven
    Jul 1, 2009 at 23:01
  • Is the link new? I swear I'd never noticed it before.
    – Gareth Simpson
    Jul 2, 2009 at 8:48
  • 1
    Related feature request: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2588/mark-answer-as-favorite (Unless this is considered FR too, in which case that other question is a dupe.)
    – Jonik
    Jul 6, 2009 at 7:50
  • 1
    I would love a bookmarks list in SO sites, which could perhaps have a capability of grouping the bookmarks as per one's liking...
    – Curious
    Aug 30, 2012 at 6:20
  • This would be great! Also, @Curious, I like that!
    – Adri C.S.
    Apr 11, 2013 at 15:09
  • Yes please! [...]
    – user308037
    Dec 6, 2016 at 19:08
  • This would also be useful for Election Info Pages.
    – Rob
    Mar 7, 2019 at 4:28
  • You can Follow answers, then retrieve their links later in your profile, but it's not a great solution
    – CertainPerformance
    Sep 1, 2020 at 15:35

9 Answers 9

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8

You can bookmark the link.

v this thing here, just bookmark it.

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  • 49
    A bookmark is an okay work-around, but it really only works if you're using the same browser and computer.
    – Adam Porad
    May 14, 2010 at 20:13
  • On a side note, you can use {Firefox, Any other browser} Portable, bring your bookmarks with you. Anywhere. (Or use a cloud service for bookmarks.)
    – user173505
    Jan 28, 2014 at 23:48
  • 2
    So I need to hit share and copy the link and paste the link and hit enter and hit create bookmark? Boy.
    – user308037
    Dec 6, 2016 at 19:07
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    @AdamPorad No, Chrome supports bookmark sync. Firefox supports bookmark sync. Safari supports bookmark sync. Opera supports bookmark sync. IE supports bookmark sync (but it's a Windows function so lots of variation, google it). Tons of extensions and services to sync across multiple browsers.
    – Jason C
    May 5, 2017 at 1:21
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    I disagree that bookmarking the link is OK as a solution. In fact anyone using a computer for longer than a couple years should disagree with this. For the programmers who will read this - Bookmarks are like global variables. You don't want to preserve everything in global variables. In fact you should try not to preserve anything in global variables. So being a member of dozens of stackexchange sites and having to manage bookmarks to posts I like to preserve definitely sucks. Especially knowing that all that it would take is an extra button and probably less than 0.1% extra storage per user.
    – user158239
    Dec 22, 2017 at 13:31
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    I have 100 answers which I want to mark as favorite, also want them to filter /sort then by the tag... Do you really think bookmarking using browser is an OK solution
    – Gaurav Singhal
    Sep 14, 2018 at 6:18
15

The closest you can do within the Stack Overflow system is favorite the question and just remember what answer you were interested in.

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  • 18
    You could also upvote the answer, and then find the answer(s) you upvoted.
    – Tom Ritter
    Jul 1, 2009 at 19:10
  • 3
    this will be even better when/if the search syntax includes filters to narrow things down to answers I upvoted.
    – Jason S
    Jul 1, 2009 at 22:07
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    @Tom Ritter: If the answer isn't a good answer to the question, this seems like a poor implementation. I've had cases where I wanted to remember/revisit an answer, but it wasn't a good answer to the original question, and thus did not deserve an up vote.
    – Travis Northcutt
    Aug 31, 2009 at 20:18
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    @Tom Ritter: up-voting would leave a trail to find the answer you wanted, but IIRC you can't undo an up-vote after a certain amount of time has passed. So you wouldn't be able to get rid of it as a bookmark once you no longer wanted to remember it.
    – Adam Porad
    May 14, 2010 at 20:16
6

Now it is possible to bookmark an answer. As you can see in the below attached screenshot, there is an option to bookmark the answer. Also, note that "Bookmarks" is now renamed to "Saves".

Enter image description here

Note

By clicking on it (the icon highlighted in the screenshot above), you'll have the option to create a new list and add this particular answer to that list. This feature request was made here: Allow users to create custom categories into which to sort bookmarks.

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5
  • 1
    It's not called "Bookmarks" though. The answer is somewhat misleading.
    – Shadow Wizard Love Zelda
    Oct 6, 2022 at 13:05
  • @ShadowTheKidWizard No, it is actually "Bookmarks" and I explicitly made the feature request for this: Allow users to create custom categories into which to sort bookmarks.
    – user12002570
    Oct 6, 2022 at 13:11
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    No. Looks like you somehow missed this announcement. Stack Exchange changed the wording. Calling it by the old name is misleading.
    – Shadow Wizard Love Zelda
    Oct 6, 2022 at 13:21
  • @ShadowTheKidWizard No, calling a "bird" a "चिड़िया"(which is hindi for bird) isn't misleading. If you read carefully the post you linked you'll find the following there: "Bookmarks are being renamed to Saves". And there is nothing misleading about that. You can call it whatever you like as long as the meaning is clear to the user. The icon used for "Saves" is the same as "Bookmarks" and it is even written that they're renaming it. I've added in my post that it is not renamed to "Saves".
    – user12002570
    Oct 6, 2022 at 13:29
  • @ShadowTheKidWizard Also, in that same post there are answers and many comments saying that the name should not have been changed and there is a feature-request to not change the name. So your claim that my answer is misleading is completely baseless.
    – user12002570
    Oct 6, 2022 at 13:46
4

With the launch of the Saves feature recently, you are now able to save answers! As such, I've added the label.

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3

You can now use our tool Afterstack to save your answers and in fact it combines, searching, type-in suggestions, and saving/managing answers in one platform.

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  • 5
    Please note that you must disclose your affiliation; see the help center.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    May 18, 2018 at 10:40
  • 2
    Aplogies @Glorfindel. I am the creator, the Afterstack account is the stack exchange account for the app and this question gave me the idea in the first place of having an app that gives the users the ability to save answers.
    – Afterstack
    May 18, 2018 at 16:57
  • 3
    @Afterstack : It seems to be offline. Is the website no longer operating?
    – Sandun
    Nov 5, 2020 at 10:13
1

I've wanted this too, particularly because one of my favorite answers is buried in a sea of other answers to that particular question. There's a relatively straight forward workaround though.

  • Favorite the related question
  • Vote up the answer you want to mark as "favorite"

If the only answer you've upvoted is your favorite one, then it's pretty easy to quickly scroll down and look for the highlighted ^.

This strat breaks down if you want to upvote other worthy answers to that question, but you may not run into that edge case very often.

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1

Unfortunately, there is still no way to bookmark answers.

Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow co-founder, Jeff Atwood, disliked the idea. Therefore, despite the popular demand by the userbase for such a feature, I doubt this will become reality any time soon, even though Jeff is no longer working with the company.

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3
1

YES you can create your OWN bookmark to a specific answer.

Example Link to answer by James instead of top of question

And as per the comments below, using the "share" link is a simple method of creating a link to the answer.

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  • 4
    It's far more simple to just click the "share" button and copy that link.
    – The Guy with The Hat
    Jan 3, 2015 at 15:43
  • agreed,and post ammeded
    – John99
    Jan 3, 2015 at 16:01
  • 2
    Can you just remove the striked-through text, if no longer applicable? Doesn't really seem to make any sense.
    – Sybille Peters
    Dec 16, 2017 at 10:27
-1

I can see the arguments as to why this would be useful.

  • Access your bookmarked answers on any device anywhere - work/home/tablet etc
  • Quicker and easier to click "Fave" on an answer than use browser bookmark functions and deciding where to save it
  • We'd have "bookmarked" answers right in our Stack profile

However, these pros are all pointless unless Stack implemented a user defined "section" area for our fave answers, so we could order them and have folders/sub folders etc.
As otherwise we just have a potential clutter of fave answers in our Stack profile in one huge long list. Once you have (say) 40, how can they easily be found and used for future reference?

However, if they did have some kind of ordering system, they'd then just be duplicating browser features, and I find that a pointless waste of dev time, and as such a useless feature really.

In that, we already have the feature with browser bookmarks as good as Stack could make it (if an ordering system was given with the feature), or better than Stack would make it if fave answers were just a big list of answers we liked.

Bookmarks are perfect

I think people should consider more closely how great bookmarks can be.

Make a new Stack bookmark folder for answers, then sub folders relevant to whatever you bookmark there, and then name files relevant too.

Such as:

  • /Stack Answers
  • -> /PHP
  • ->-> PDO prepared statements great notes
  • ->-> time() function perfect usage description
  • -> /CSS
  • ->-> Z-Index good description
  • ->-> Difference between positions - absolute, relative etc

The Stack Share link is perfect for getting the URL to store as a bookmark.

Other caveats to answer faves

Stack content can be removed at any time, so if an answer is of great resource to you, and future reference, it and many others can be lost.

If you don't like browser bookmarks, and or are wanting a great collection of info and useful data for future reference, then perhaps you need to be copy/pasting answer text into a collection of files on your PC, in folders named to store them sanely.

Having fave answers would also would mean a potential for people to upvote an answer without any justification other than it helped them, and might not be a good answer for the question.

Habits can be formed, where someone reads an answer, likes it, makes it a fave and upvotes it.
Not ideal really.

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  • 3
    -1. Bookmarks may be useful for some people (including you), but they are nowhere near "perfect". If the site didn't already have favourite questions, your logic can also be used to argue against them being implemented. Arguing against a feature request just because you don't mind its costs doesn't take the other users of the site into consideration.
    – March Ho
    Feb 10, 2015 at 13:01
  • More good reasons why this answer is poor (comments to Jeff Atwood's downvoted to hell non-answer) meta.stackexchange.com/a/107790/278258
    – March Ho
    Feb 10, 2015 at 13:12
  • 8 years later, and we have these new features, and I still hate that we've duplicated browser bookmarks, which are perfectly adequate for the job. Especially now most main browser allow syncing to all devices, export and backups, etc.
    – James
    Oct 26, 2022 at 0:02

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