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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?
You can bookmark the link.
v this thing here, just bookmark it.
The closest you can do within the Stack Overflow system is favorite the question and just remember what answer you were interested in.
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".
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.
With the launch of the Saves feature recently, you are now able to save answers! As such, I've added the status-completed label.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can see the arguments as to why this would be useful.
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.
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/PHPPDO prepared statements great notestime() function perfect usage description/CSSZ-Index good descriptionDifference between positions - absolute, relative etcThe Stack Share link is perfect for getting the URL to store as a bookmark.
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.
