I think it would be cool if a question would eventually open up to moderators to accept answers on the user's behalf, once a time period has passed. The asking user would get the rep score for the accept.
I know I've seen questions successfully answered with lots of upvotes and no accepted answer that sit there for months unaccepted. This would give superusers a little more functionality and would tie up a lot of loose ends.
What do you think?
No, this is a user-oriented site.
It is intended to answer people's questions. They know their problem the best and know what solves it for them. We need to leave it up to them to accept whatever answer they want. People will know what the community agrees with by the upvotes. The power to accept an answer should stay in the user/asker's hand. That way you have both opinions/views in a question.
The moderators are in no way product experts. We were chosen to oversee the community and ensure that the users have someone to turn to for assistance. We are only here to deal with disputes and ensure the sites remain civil.
Although most of the moderators know the subject core of their respective sites well, none of them will necessarily know what the right answer is, even if it is voted. Furthermore it adds more work for the moderators to do.
For example. There is currently 33000+ questions without accepted answers on SO, how long will it take the 2 SO moderators to read and accept everyone of these questions?
I don't think this will work.
There are corner cases where this may be a good idea. Maybe the number of times this is true is too small to worry about, but I'll put it out there for others to consider.
For example, this answer:
Android: Failure delivering result ResultInfo{who=null, request=1, result=-1, data=Intent
Solution:
Draw the bitmap during SurfaceChanged, using a flag whether to load image.
As of the time of my post, the OP answered his own question and clearly identified that it was the desired solution in text, but they neglected (forgot or due to lack of knowledge) to mark it as the accepted answer. It also could have been someone else's answer and the OP could have indicated its the desired answer in the comments.
[[ In this particular case, the question is new - the OP is still around and may remember to accept the answer at some point, but its not inconceivable that the OP could never be seen again. ]]
I think it would be nice for the community to flag situations like this in older questions, so a mod (or diamond mod) could review these "hanging chads" case-by-case and reflect the user's intent by accepting the answer on the user's behalf. The mods are simply converting a non-standard acceptance of an answer (by the OP stating in text that a given answer was the correct one) to the standard accepted answer format.
Another example:
Mysql group_contact with conditions
The OP retitled the question to: [SOLVED BY AWN] Mysql group_contact with conditions by did not accept the answer (as of the time of this edit). Again, the intent is clear.
hasaccepted:0 to see what problems are not yet solved. And I find the situations you described quite frequent among these "unanswered" questions. If the questions were closed with a reason "self-answered" instead of being accepted it would satisfy me too.
Commented
Sep 20, 2012 at 8:06
What assurance do we have that the moderator knows the correct answer? If they're just going to select the most upvoted answer, we could automate that answer. That would be just as inaccurate, and save the moderators the work.
Moderators should be there to handle the exceptional, not something so mundane. Think of the work load you'll add.
I don't agree
Even though there is not an accepted answer, the most voted one will float to the top.
There were a few features added to encourage accepting answers, so I don't think something like this will be implemented (people are going to want to raise that accepted ratio eventually)
The only thing that annoys me more than no documentation is incorrect documentation.
Since these are Q&A sites we're talking about, if I go searching for an issue and don't find anything then I'll just keep looking or ask the question myself. But if I were to search and find a question on StackOverflow with an accepted answer and plenty of upvotes, and that answer doesn't actually resolve the problem, I wouldn't be pleased. Rather than moving on, most people would now be wondering why a known solution is failing to resolve their problem.
The best way around this would probably be to leave a note saying that the question was forcibly accepted by a moderator, and may or may not work. In which case, what is the point of even marking it as accepted?
As far as your concerns about there being a huge collection of unanswered questions, I'd rather the questions be left unresolved than misleadingly marked as resolved.
The focus should be on encouraging users to resolve their own questions than finding ways to do it for them.
Ended up here from a new question being duped to this one.
I welcome the idea to get questions marked as "answered" and have question authors indicate which answer helped them the most.
However it must be via the question author.
As defined in the Help Center, an accepted answer is specifically:
Accepting an answer is not meant to be a definitive and final statement indicating that the question has now been answered perfectly. It simply means that the author received an answer that worked for him or her personally
So an accepted answer:
So users other than the question author can only mark what they think is the best answer based on the question and answer text and which answer directly answered the question. This would not necessarily be the answer which specifically helped the question author the most.
Only the question author knows which answer was the best answer which helped them. And this is the entire purpose of an accepted answer.
If we allow anyone other than question author to mark as "accepted" then we have literally changed to meaning and purpose of "accepted answer" - and that is a new proposal altogether and not one which should be hidden as an unintentional side-effect of a different proposal (as with this one here).
So no, we cannot let anyone other than the question author accept an answer, not even moderators.
If you want to clean up unanswered questions, you need an idea and feature-request where either:
(1):
You somehow get the question author to come back and accept.
Bearing in mind users may well forget which answer helped them the most and just accept the highest upvoted one.
More "rewards" to entice them back may get answers accepted just to earn the reward.
Neither option necessarily means question author will accept the one which "helped them the most", so all we'd do is "clean up" and not show genuine accepted answers.
(2):
Users other than the question author resolves this without marking an answer as "accepted".
Such as (just an example I'm not suggesting we do this):
Do not label a question as "unanswered" which:
So for example a question:
This is not perfect, and has issues, it's just an example idea of a way we can clean up old "unanswered" questions which are arguably answered in some sense (have decent and upvoted answers).
That said, we do risk losing out on users potentially going through "unanswered" questions and providing an even better answer than the current ones.
The above algorithms could be tweaked to fix that, but it might just be the case that we cannot do anything about questions being "unanswered" for a long time or indefinitely.
Either way, it needs a new angle than allowing moderators (or anyone) to accept answers on the question author's behalf.
The discussion of someone other than the OP has come up many times, and each time it's been met with general disdain. The prevailing thought is that only the OP should be the one to decide whether or not the answer met the expectations / qualifications and as such should be the sole judge in awarding the acceptance check. The community gets to vote and that is enough.
Why not add a "recommended" option?
Leave the accepted answer option alone
Add the ability for "experts" to recommend answers
Only somebody with a gold badge in one of the question tags would be considered an expert and could recommend, and their name would need to be shown
Obviously they cannot recommend their own answers
More than one expert can recommend answers and more than one answer can be recommended including the accepted one
The most recent recommendation would be listed first
A question with a recommended answer could come off the unaccepted answer queue
What happens on SE sites:
Users don't accept clearly correct answers themselves, even when reminded to do so (causes: inactivity, don't know how to use site, not enough reward for them)
There already is an accepted answer, but now it's obsolete or not working. The now correct answer will (should) get more upvotes, but it will be listed after the accepted one (causes: better answer made by someone, the subject of answer get's updated/changed - usually software - making old answer obsolete)
People that visit such question will be visually presented with wrong answer or no answer at all, which IS a problem that can/needs-to be solved.
Solution:
Give high enough reputation (should be high - it's up to discussion) users the privilege to accept answers. Also voting could be the mechanism so the power is not on an individual.
The change of answer should be possible only after some time and/or only to the answer with more upvotes.
Counter arguments for some other answers here:
User oriented site argument - So let's leave everything up to users and remove privileges and mods altogether.. well no, it would be a mess. That's why we have mods and why high reputation users have privileges. Accepted answers which are an important part of every question is solely in hands of ordinary non-trusted users. This is not right, trusted users should have privilege over this to keep the site clean. The site will stay user oriented.
It won't put more work on mods. It will get them better tools to keep the site clean and organized. That's what mods like to do, why would they do it otherwise?
High reputation users are experts, when couple of them votes that an answer or another answer is better - than it is better. Same like they can vote that another question has duplicate answer that answers the question. It's the same thing. And if I am not sure about the subject I would not act - same as I would not vote on a duplicate question when I don't understand it. Very simple. An erroneous accepted answer would not be introduced but removed/corrected.
And now the big paradox:
What I can do already: Edit every letter in an accepted answer to totally rewrite it when I have edit privileges.
What no one other than OP can do: Touch which answer is marked accepted.
I would rather mark another answer as correct than to change/update answer, to leave it there. I don't know what the dilemma is and why we don't have this functionality long time ago..
