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I have had answers, such as this one, where the question asker comments below it and says something like: "Thanks, that did the trick!" but doesn't accept the answer. Is there anyway to flag a question as "apparently answered" so that the questioner can get a stronger suggestion to flag it as answered?

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  • I see a need for this too. Some of us use SO as an additional support community for products, and so the "unanswered" question list is an important resource, and unanswered question rates are important metrics. Questions that are answered, but not accepted or up-voted, stay on the list and increase unanswered rates. It is possible to up-vote an answer to remove it from the unanswered list, but only if it has not already been down-voted (sometimes for no good reason).
    – harrism
    Oct 9, 2012 at 1:14
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    Related: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/109773/…
    – user138231
    Oct 9, 2012 at 2:04

1 Answer 1

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There's no such flag.

If the user is very new and/or has a 0% accept rate, it might be appropriate to very gently suggest that they accept the answer that helped them solve the problem.

Rude comments are always unacceptable, and virtually any accept rate other than 0% (suggesting that they simply don't know how accepting answers works) is not okay to bother someone about.

Realize that users might not accept an answer for perfectly valid reasons (they're waiting to see if an even better answer appears) or even totally idiosyncratic reasons (they only accept answers with perfect grammar) and sometimes there's simply nothing to be done. Take quiet pride in having helped someone with a problem they faced and hope that the next person is more reciprocating.

This does make the unanswered questions list less useful as some of those questions actually are answered, but the feeling so far has been that potential fixes (like an "apparently answered" flag) will likely introduce more problems than they'd solve.

h/t jonsca

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    Thanks, that did the trick! That really is the definitive answer!!! I've been racking my brain trying to think of something you didn't cover, but I came up empty!! Asked and ANSWERED!!
    – Scooter
    Oct 9, 2012 at 6:10
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    @Scooter In that case, you should edit the question title and append "[SOLVED]" at the end.
    – Mr Reenlist'er
    Oct 9, 2012 at 15:03
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    @MrLister I certainly will at some point, but I would like to wait a little longer to see if there is an even better answer.
    – Scooter
    Oct 10, 2012 at 9:43
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    @Scooter YOU NEED TO ACCEPT THE ANSWER!!!!!! IT'S NOT THAT HARD. CLICK THE CHECKMARK. DONE. YOU'RE BEING RUDE. Sorry, couldn't resist that. :P
    – Anonymous Penguin
    Aug 9, 2013 at 18:02

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