Adding a way to mark answer as "partially accepted"

Question

When someone gives me an answer which is useful, but doesn't fully answer the question, there is a problem when I need to decide what to do with it.

If I accept this partial answer, no one will answer me no matter how I show the unsolved part of my problem, because the question is considered "answered".

However, If I do not accept it, there is another problem: if a second person answered the unsolved part, which answer should I accept? But the majority work may be done by the first one. If this style become consistent, who will answered an almost solved question?

In my point of view, there should be something like a progress bar which allows me to allocate the percentage of acceptance to users who answered my question. This would make everyone feel comfortable.

Answer 1

I think this is too complicated to implement in the system. I don't think this work is worth it, because questions are supposed to be solved in a single answer, not in a bunch of partial answers. One of our principles is that answered questions should be useful to other users who have the same problem; having the answer in a bunch of partial answers makes the post difficult to follow.

The existing design encourages exactly that: posting the entire answer in a single answer makes it likely to be accepted, whereas a partial answer will not be accepted because the OP can't accept, which discourages users from posting partial answers. Yes, I know the OP is caught in the middle here, but this strategy works.

If the question is composed of multiple parts that you need to answer in multiple answers, it's a sign that the question itself may be too broad.

Anyway, if you do get a bunch of partial answers rather than a single answer, my advice is to post a self-answer detailing exactly what you did to solve the problem, crediting the answer authors in the process. You shouldn't accept a partial answer, as it makes the entire post difficult to follow for others reading it.

In summary, I don't support this because the existing design incentivizes answerers to post a single answer that answers the entire question, and discourages askers from asking too-broad questions.