Forcing Acceptance [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicates:
Would it be possible to have a “community accepted” feature?
Moderators accepting answers on user's behalf after a certain time period

I am asking this question because it seems to work on MSDN.

Are users in favor of having community moderators 'force acceptance' of the highest upvoted answer after a question has been idle for 30 days? MSDN seems to force it a lot faster, which I don't particularly agree with but I do like the idea of forced acceptance. My proposal is to show questions that have been idle for 30 days or more in the review tab for 10K+ users to go in and force the acceptance of answers that have the most upvotes. It could even be done automatically by Community user.

Answer 1

I think this will increase the chances of wrong answers being accepted. Question askers aren't infallible, but they have their code in front of them, and they can easily tell whether a solution works for them. Even a very clever moderator will have trouble doing that.

IMHO, getting a bad answer accepted is one of the worst things that can happen on a site like this. It pushes the signal/noise ratio much higher because it's harder to filter out unhelpful content, and in the worst case, you could waste time pursuing a solution that doesn't work. I would MUCH rather take my chances of missing a few rep I "deserve" than risk poisoning the site with wrong, off-topic, or otherwise worthless answers. It's incredibly annoying to google something you're struggling with, finding it on some Q&A board, and discover that the "answer" doesn't work, is a non-answer, or isn't relevant to the question. It's funny you mention MSDN, because this has been a frustration when looking for answers there.

I would consider supporting this if it was only ever applied to questions from "ask-and-disappear" users who pop in, ask a detailed question, and are never seen again. It's frustrating to answer such questions, because you'll post something very detailed and thought-out, but there's no reward for it unless someone else wanders in and agrees with you.

I'd default to not implementing this feature at all. If it is implemented, I would only support it if:

• It could only be done by a human -- NEVER by Community or an automated process
• It could only be done by a moderator, not just a 10K+ user
• It could only be done on answers with at least one upvote
• It was only allowed when the answer CLEARLY solved the problem, and the original asker was a one-time user who had disappeared.

Notice I'm differentiating between "ask-and-forget" users and regular users with a low accept rate. The site has incentives to get people to accept more answers, and if the asker's accept rate is already 8%, you know what you're getting into. It's only when answering a question from a 1-rep user who signed up today that you're rolling your dice like this.

The one potential value I see in this feature is encouraging people to answer questions from brand-new users, who may or may not ever visit the site again. It's in the site's interest to make sure new users (and future Googlers) find what they're looking for. If people start avoiding questions from brand-new users, those people aren't going to stick around.