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Ok, I answered this Question for a user some 10 minutes back and it helped him so he thanked me and upvoted my answer. I politely asked him to mark it as an answer also. Is that rep-whoring ?

Also, he thanked me a couple of times and i know that SO states that we should refrain from making unnecessary comment but in this case i felt obliged to respond.

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    The OP has almost 500 rep and asked some question which many of them were accepted. I think that was kind of unnecessary to remind OP of anything.
    – juergen d
    Oct 15, 2013 at 8:21
  • Hmm, Thats a good point. Just felt that since he upvoted me first, maybe he made a mistake.
    – MarsOne
    Oct 15, 2013 at 8:23
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    Generally if they know how to mark a question as "answered", you shouldn't. However, there is an edge case where they say "it answered my question, thanks" (or something to that effect), don't give that comment to any other answer and don't mark the question as "answered", which I'm not sure about.
    – Qantas 94 Heavy
    Oct 15, 2013 at 8:23
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    What about the "how does accepting as answer work" link? is that ok?
    – MarsOne
    Oct 15, 2013 at 8:28
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    Regarding your other point "we should refrain from making unnecessary comment but in this case i felt obliged to respond", I usually add my reply as a comment and after approx. 24 hours I delete such comments.
    – Aziz Shaikh
    Oct 15, 2013 at 8:30
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    @danielhanly.com, I do not think its a duplicate, Mainly because im not asking for an upvote, Hell that answer did not even deserve an upvote. Im just asking him to accept the answer.
    – MarsOne
    Oct 15, 2013 at 8:32
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    If someone (a new user) comments to say their problem is solved I suggest they accept an answer to mark that their problem is solved
    – Richard Tingle
    Oct 15, 2013 at 8:34
  • @MarsOne I added it as a possible duplicate because many of the sentiments are discussed within, a considerable amount of the answers discuss both upvotes and acceptances. Might be good reading for you.
    – Dan Hanly
    Oct 15, 2013 at 8:35

2 Answers 2

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Well I wouldn't really call it rep-whoring (its a big word), but then asking the OP to accept an answer, when the OP has been a user of Stack Overflow for quite a long time(he obviously would know about accepting an answer), doesn't leave a good impression about you on others.

If the OP is a newbie, or may be has forgotten (you answer has solved the OP's problem, but no answer has been accepted for a long time now), in such a case, you could politely leave a comment to the OP, asking him to accept the answer stating that, this is how Stack Overflow functions. Once the OP has accepted the answer, you may clean up those comments (it would be good to do that, but it's not a mandate).

IMHO, you're being a bit too harsh (rep-whoring) on yourself for asking the OP to accept an answer.

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  • But then, if the OP gives all the indications needed to qualify an answer as acceptable, and there is no other accepted answer, so it may easily be the case that the OP simply forgot about/skipped it (even being a long time user... in the end, he/she would possibly have a significant activity, hard to track if not acted upon on the spot), why perceiving a not-so-good-impression?
    – sancho.s ReinstateMonicaCellio
    Nov 20, 2013 at 1:26
  • @sancho.s - I did mention that if the OP has forgotten and there is no answer which was accepted for a long time, you could, in that case, leave a comment for the OP.
    – Rahul
    Nov 20, 2013 at 3:55
  • but then asking the OP to accept an answer, when the OP has been a user of Stack Overflow for quite a long time(he obviously would know about accepting an answer), doesn't leave a good impression about you on others That’s just it. If the user is new (to the whole SE network, not just that site), then nudging them is teaching them about how the site works (assuming they ever come back). If they have been around for a while, then they should know better (assuming that the question was indeed completely resolved).
    – Synetech
    Dec 23, 2013 at 22:59
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What is the point of your question?

Is "rep-whoring" illegal on the StackExchange? Not as such.

Do we care that you might be doing it? Not really.

Does it bother me that you've got a muddled conscience over it? A little - if it bothers you then don't do it. If it doesn't bother you then don't post on Meta about it.

Is it good form to ask someone to accept your answer? It bothers me more that you couldn't specifically search for that.

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    I agree, some better searching was needed. But I would rather we didn't discourage users from asking etiquette questions simply because you happen not to care about them.
    – Duncan Jones
    Oct 15, 2013 at 10:41

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