Should one help educate new users who may not know how to accept answers?

Question

Following on from Check mark discoverability seems to be low for new users, I've taken to commenting with the following proforma whenever I see a 0% accept rate a question from a new user who has asked multiple questions, but never accepted an answer (especially if they have indicated in comments to previous questions that an answer solved their problem):

Welcome to Stack Overflow! I can see that you asked a few questions here before, but haven't marked any of the answers you received as accepted. Accepting answers rewards the poster and shows the community that your problem has been solved; you can also upvote any post if it's useful or helpful. Please take a moment to revisit your questions and accept answers that solved your problems: it will make people more willing to help you in the future.

In response, I was recently pointed by another user to the meta discussion Is it appropriate to comment on people's accept rate? (of which I was already aware and indeed had devised the above message after reading, intending to be as helpful and friendly as possible). For the record, since reading that discussion, accept rate has not stopped me from answering questions.

Clearly, some think that the above message is still poor etiquette: but it was intended to help inform new users who may not understand the workings of the site. I would have liked to include further information about posting & accepting one's own answers to questions solved by oneself, or promoting/improving questions that have not yet been answered satisfactorily, or deleting questions that cannot be answered—but sadly there was not room to do so without losing other useful information.

I was going to request a feature to notify users with 0% accept rate that they should accept answers, but clearly that would duplicate Show alert for users with 0% (or low) acceptance rate. Whilst a feature like that would negate any need for the community to provide new users with such guidance, in the meantime many new users remain unaware about question acceptance.

I would like to know whether attempts to educate new users in the way I tried are indeed poor etiquette?

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UPDATE

To those who argue that users should be free to leave resolved questions unaccepted should they so wish, my view is that such non-acceptance is harmful to the community because:

1. future visitors can't be certain whether their identical problem ought to be solved by any of the answers (and certainly the answer that solved the OP's problem may be buried amongst other answers, rather than highlighted and shown at the top); and

2. helpful users might keep coming back to the open question (e.g. through the "unanswered" tab) thinking that further contribution is being sought, only to frustratingly find that the question is answered: this discourages use of the "unanswered" tab and makes genuinely unanswered questions harder to find through the noise.

Answer 1

While phrased more nicely, it's still noise and doesn't satisfy any of the things that comments are for.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to educate Stack Overflow users, I'm very much a fan of that, but consider the following:

• We have visual (color) cues that indicate to everyone that their accept rate is different than other people's.
• The system nags the user with a dialog asking them to accept answers to questions they've asked.

That said, it's perfectly feasible to let the system do this. We're not helping anything along by piling a comment on (which will then have to be cleaned up later, something requiring you or other people to do more work for little benefit to the site).

Rather, I'd argue that energy is better spent in the review queue, suggesting edits, flagging posts for moderator attention, etc.

Having questions with unaccepted answers is not an indicator of poor quality on the site, and we have many other, higher priority issues directly related to quality that have to be dealt with before we should crusade for accept rate (so we can all bust caps, yo).

Answer 2

I don't like visible accept rate and accept rate comments. However, looking at the comment you post, it's not the worst I've seen.

It's informative, never hints at the accept rate percentage as such, and informs the user to accept answers which have solved their problems. Good going so far. With many similar comments often not going beyond "please increase your accept rate", I would personally not necessarily flag yours.

My only nitpick? Your last line: "it will make people more willing to help you in the future". This is the only point where your message strays from informative to "start accepting or we won't help you". Surely that's not how you mean it, but I would not be surprised if it's taken as such. If you decide to keep making the comment, I would take out that last line.

That being said, I don't think any user should (have to) make such comments. This is easily something that can be deferred to the system.

Answer 3

I've taken to commenting with the following proforma whenever I see a 0% accept rate

Please don't. It has been said many times and I even posted another answer on the matter. Now I'm posting here to add something new.

I have many accounts and on some of them I have quite a lot reputation. There are some questions I've asked where I haven't accepted yet. Ok my accept rate is around 50-70% but I don't care that much honestly. The accept rate means only that: how much you have accepted. It doesn't say:

• if I care about accepting;
• if I'm asking for help in a malicious way.
• etc

That's why such comments exist, because many misunderstanding this meaning. And it's for this reason that I agree on removing this information (if they ever decide to do it). I'm not saying you do it because you're bad and you want to be "bad". I'm sure you're doing it because you want to help, but it doesn't really help. You say you don't like unaccepted questions because that leaves the question "open".

Yes, the non-acceptance leaves questions open, and if the OP is not satisfied, it must stay open. Why should would they want it to be "closed" if they don't find any answer worth of it?

You're kind of forcing those OPs to accept answers when they don't really want to. And this creates a problem: accepting an answer is a responsibility towards new visitors. If you accept something just for the sake of it, you're presenting potentially wrong (or partially incorrect) answers to future users. Whether it takes 1 hour, 2 days or 2 weeks, accept the proper answer, not just "an answer so that my accept rate goes up".

The only occasion that I think you can post something about accepting (and not about the accept rate) is when there is a new user who genuinely doesn't know about accepting an answer or how it works. Then you can comment like (whether the answer is mine or not, doesn't matter): "I'm glad you found this answer useful. In case you do, remember that you can check the tickmark to signal your accepted answer". As soon as the OP does it (or if they reply saying that they are not satisfied yet), remove the comment as it becomes obsolete.

Lastly, you say that in your opinion "non-acceptance is harmful to the community"... Well, certainly we all wish for answers to be accepted, but acceptance is not the only way to signal a good/correct/helpful answer. Upvotes play a major role in this and they are the community way to accept an answer, since they cannot do otherwise. When I browse for new questions, I honestly don't care whether the OP accepted one answer or no, because the acceptance shows what was more helpful for the OP, not for me. I browse any answer and upvote where necessary (accepted or not). If all are useful answers but one was particularly helpful for me, that won't necessarily be the same answers that the OP accepted... Hope I didn't make a mess and this last paragraph was clear enough.