New users who don't realise how to accept an answer [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Improve the indication to askers that they can accept answers to questions

I am fed up of posting answers where new users don't realise that they have to click the tick icon to accept the answer.

I would like to post the idea that a prompt appears if a user is viewing their own question who is considered new (maybe < 3 questions asked or just 0% reputation) that explains to them that they have to choose an answer.

Something really obvious like a floating box with an animated arrow nudging at the tick icon.

Answer 1

I am fed up with experienced users who get all bent out of shape about whether askers accept their answers. You have plenty of reputation to participate fully on the site, so this is clearly just an ego thing.

Perhaps the asker didn't find your answer helpful or it didn't actually solve their problem. Why should they accept your answer in that case?

Beyond that, a variant of your proposed solution already exists. When users have less than 1k reputation, they get a pop-up reminder to accept the answer whenever they upvote it. It says:

don't forget you can mark this as the accepted answer by clicking its check mark

Not to mention there's a huge, hollow check mark glyph in the margin of the answer. Since people are naturally curious (and since they've seen this arrow filled in on other people's questions), they might wonder what in the world this icon means or does. If they hover over it, they'll see a tooltip that says:

Click to set this answer as your accepted answer; click again to toggle

People who ignore the existing UI prompts aren't likely to pay any attention to obnoxious animation, either. That will just annoy people who do follow instructions, the kind of users we'd like to keep around.

If you honestly think that your answer is helpful to a new user, but they haven't read the FAQ and don't understand how to accept an answer, you could leave a helpful comment in the following vein:

Welcome to Stack Overflow! If my answer helped to solve your problem, please consider marking it as accepted. That's the customary way of indicating that your question is "resolved" and thanking the person who helped you.

But be nice, otherwise people will flag these comments as rude/offense, and they will get removed.

Answer 2

I totally agree with @Lix and @Cody here, but there's one side effect of pushing new users into accepting an answer that hasn't been mentioned yet:

If you push/force/hound new users to accept an answer, they'll accept any answer, just to shut you up

This is far worse for the site than no accepted answer at all.

Answer 3

There is a mechanism that is built into the system to remind users to see if there is an answer worth accepting on their posts with no accepted answers.

In addition I usually post this link : How does accept rate work?

Or even directly to the answer :
https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/65088/172936

clicking on the check box outline to the left of the answer.

This is of course if your answer is useful - you can not bully a user into accepting your answer - perhaps it did not solve the problem or perhaps it is not a complete solution.

Accepting an answer is by no means a requirement and no one is obligated to mark an answer as accepted. It would be nice though if you could convince the OP to explain why he feels that the answer is not worthy of being accepted - this may lead to improving the answer and perhaps ultimately receiving the check mark.