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Stackoverflow.com has a perfectly good system for accepting an answer to a question. And for questions where you come up with a solution for yourself, writing an answer and marking it as accepted is the correct way forward.

Sadly, many newbies to the site don't seem to understand these concepts, and it's quite common to see questions that have been edited with "SOLVED" or something similar, often with a bit of update text at the end of the question to explain the solution.

At this point, these questions probably need to be closed, but in a lot of cases the existing close options aren't always appropriate.

I therefore propose a new close option: "Question resolved".

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    Why not post the answer as an answer instead?
    – John Dvorak
    Commented Jun 10, 2013 at 9:28
  • @Jan - 1. because the question has likely been abandoned by the OP once he's "solved" it, so that won't be accepted anyway, and 2. because I don't want to be rep-whoring.
    – Spudley
    Commented Jun 10, 2013 at 9:32
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    Who cares if the OP abandoned it? And if you don't want to be rep-whoring, post his answer as community wiki.
    – Bart
    Commented Jun 10, 2013 at 9:33
  • @Bart - I didn't think of the wiki option; Good point. But re who cares... I guess I just got fed up because I was I had a few spare minutes this morning to answer a question or two, and I wasted a fair bit of that time because several of the questions I clicked on to answer turned out to have been solved even though they had no answers or none accepted.
    – Spudley
    Commented Jun 10, 2013 at 9:40
  • Anyway, I guess I'm thinking in the wrong direction on this. Maybe trying to detect when an OP tries to do this, and point them toward posting an answer might be a better solution? I dunno. But there is a problem at the core of it that people aren't grokking the system properly.
    – Spudley
    Commented Jun 10, 2013 at 9:42

2 Answers 2

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The fact the problem explained in the question has been resolved is not a reason for closing the question. If that would be true, every questions with an accepted answer should be closed as solved.
The fact the OP has accepted an answer should not avoid users add new answers. Sometimes, a better answer is written after the OP already accepted an answer, and that answer is up-voted or even accepted instead of the old answer. That is what happened to me, at least once.

What it needs to be done is:

  • Remove solved from the question's title; that is an habit users have from forums
  • Leave a comment for the OP, suggesting him to write an answer explaining what he did to solve the problem, instead of writing an answer inside the question
  • If then the OP doesn't do as suggested, write as answer (possibly making it a Community Wiki) what the OP wrote in his question, and edit the question to remove that part (Thanks go to Bart for suggesting me to add this point.)

Clearly, the question could be closed for any of the existing reasons, if they do apply. For example, if the OP is saying that the problem was caused by typo in some file, then the question could be closed as too localized.

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    Perhaps add that's it's perfectly acceptable to create an actual answer out of the solution (CW if you don't want the rep), should the OP not reply. Then I don't have to add an answer. ;)
    – Bart
    Commented Jun 10, 2013 at 9:36
  • That's right. :)
    – avpaderno
    Commented Jun 10, 2013 at 9:40
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I would say that it is a bad idea to close question even though they already accepted an answer. Closing the question would mean that noone else is able to post another answer to it. What if someone sees the question and the answer and thinks he has a other/better way of solving the problem? If he can still post his answer it could help future users.

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