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What do you think about a badge for users having 100% accept rate?

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  • I'd like to expand this question: what is "accept rate" and why don't some users have it listed below their user credentials?
    – Evan Kroske
    Commented Aug 23, 2009 at 20:29
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    Evan that's a totally different question, belongs in its own thread.
    – Ian Elliott
    Commented Aug 23, 2009 at 20:32
  • @John: FWIW, you might also like this suggestion: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16637/…
    – Shog9
    Commented Aug 23, 2009 at 20:42

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I think that encourages the wrong behavior. I feel pressured to accept answers just to keep my percentage high, even if the questions I asked have no relevant answers. It's too easy of a task to go around accepting a single answer for each question, and encouraging this could lead to wrong or incorrect answers being marked as accepted; which is definitely undesirable.

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    right now our philosophy is "present the numbers and you decide what it means". We do have some ambient sort orders that are chosen for specific reasons, but in general, that's the philosophy.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Aug 23, 2009 at 21:21
  • @Ian, I must disagree. If it's so easy to accept a single answer for each question, then why do so many people not have 100% (except metaSO, of course)? In the very least, if no answer fits your question, but you found something that works, put yours in and accept it.
    – MPelletier
    Commented Mar 20, 2010 at 20:33
  • That suggestion to answer your own question only works if the one who asked the question knows the answer, which seems unlikely most of the time. Yes, I'm one-and-a-half year late in saying this, but it feels relevant to mention this anyway.
    – Aberrant
    Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 12:19
  • I feel pressured to accept answers just to keep my percentage high, even if the questions I asked have no relevant answers - If no answers match for me, I answer myself explaining what workaround I used or what amalgamation of answers used
    – James Webster
    Commented Jul 25, 2012 at 14:28
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Regardless of whether or not it's too easy or encourages the right behavior, i don't like it because badges aren't revoked. So if you accept answers to your first three questions and never accept another answer, regardless of how many hundreds of questions you post, the badge starts to look kinda sad.

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I think that it not only encourages the wrong behavior as Ian mentioned but that it is highly subjective or variable. I might have a 100% accept rate right now, but once I ask another question that starts getting answers my accept rate will go down. Would I then be awarded the badge mutliple times, each time I hit a 100% accept rate?

In fact, to me it seems that even indicating an accept rate at all is going to encourage people to start accepting answers just to increase their accept rate, which will ultimately have the opposite effect as what is intended. I also think that it is going to cause some people to not answer a question if the poster has a low accept rate.

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Accept rate is variable. If we want badge for this, badge should be for time frame (month, quarter).

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Encouraging accepting answers rather than always accepting an answer might be key. How about a badge for every x answers accepted, without so many points attached? That way there's a slight incentive to accept, but not so much that it creates a bias.

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    For the same reasons, I'd be interested in seeing where we get by taking accepting an answer from +2 to +5 rep, and drop the rate display. meta.stackexchange.com/questions/42769/…
    – Gnome
    Commented Mar 21, 2010 at 0:07
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What we want to reward is the time taken to read all answers and decide if they address the question. If one answer does and is clearly better than the other ones, then accepting an answer is the obvious way to thank the answerer and state that he/she got a relevant answer.

But if no response definitely answer the question, the original poster could still be rewarded in some way for having done the same work as accepting an answer. I even appreciate his/her honesty in not accepting any answer.

I have no suggestion of new feature, I just wanted to point out what we really value behind the "100% accept rate".

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