Should I keep downvoting questions with answers that aren't accepted?

Question

Sometimes people ask questions and never bother to follow up and accept the (obviously correct) answer.

My solution is to downvote the question. Even if the question is good, they were too lazy to follow up, and they deserve the downvote.

Is there a better solution?

Answer 1

That's bad IMO.

You aren't voting for the quality of the content, but rather users' behavior (whether the author is following up is surely a behavior), which is a common mispractice of voting.

While it's your right and privilege to decide what and how to vote on, you had better not waste your time and votes for this kind of questions anymore.

(On Meta sites, one can also vote for agreement or disagreement, but usually still not for user behavior.)

Answer 2

This sounds like a very bad reason to downvote and unhealthy to everyone involved, you, the asker, the community as a whole, SE's voting system, and not the least its reputation.

If that's the only reason why you're downvoting the question, especially if you yourself think it's actually a good question, you are downvoting for purely personal reasons, which you shouldn't. We vote for posts here, not users.

And not only that, you might even be wrong in your assessment of the asker. You don't know why they never followed up on accepting. They're most certainly not doing it because they're bad, most likely not even because they're "lazy". Maybe the answer isn't so "obviously correct". Maybe they want to give the question more time and encourage more answers. Maybe they just haven't found the time for fully engaging the answers yet. Or at "worst", maybe they even agree with your assessment but just don't know fully yet how SE works.

In the interest of the communities you participate in and also its users', I would strongly implore you to reconsider this approach. Vote abuse of this kind can really hurt a community, and I don't really believe negativity of this kind helps you either, certainly not on the long run.

What you could do is ask the asker if there are any unclarities you haven't adressed yet. But even if he doesn't answer your requests, please don't take that personal. Be happy about the upvotes you got on your answer, be proud you contributed a good answer to the site, and enjoy the reputation you got for it. Acceptance, however, really doesn't mean all that much. And if you're worried that your time was wasted on possibly helping someone who doesn't appreciate it, think of all the other users who upvoted your answer for helping them (and the future users yet to come).

Answer 3

Even if the question is good, they were too lazy to follow up, and they deserve the downvote.

No. While you're free to downvote as you like, it's very much appreciated if you follow the golden rule: "Vote for the content, not for the author." It's a good question (you said it yourself), so vote it up.

Whether an answer is accepted or not doesn't really matter anyway. That's just one person's decision/opinion; whether an answer is good or not is better judged by the entire community, whose decision is reflected in the answer score, not in that checkmark or lack thereof.

Is there a better solution?

Sometimes leaving a comment helps. New users often aren't familiar with the etiquette here and simply don't know they can accept an answer (or edit their question to provide more details). Try to focus on the benefits for that user ("without more information we won't be able to help you") rather than trying to shove Stack Exchange rules down their throat; "without more information we'll close your question" is not really welcoming.

But not accepting it creates a drain on the whole site, because it looks "unanswered" and shows up when you filter that way.

If you suspect an answer would work (even though you can't test it) you can upvote the answer to remove the 'unanswered' status on the question. See Why does the "Unanswered Questions" tab show questions that have answers?

Answer 4

I can relate to LevenTech very much.

If you are trying to search/filter for questions without an answer (that is: You are an answerer, willing to invest time on questions and with the prospect of earning some Rep), you want the next question which has something to do for you, then you only have the Filter options for "unanswered" and "newest" and "no accepted answer".

But if you check that queue you often find:

• Questions which are "newest" but still are older than a year, sometimes older than 10 years.
• Which have about 1k views, which I assume to be mostly by answerers who opened the question, but left again, because there was nothing to do, but the question still popped up in the queue.
• Which maybe have an answer, also a good one maybe. But no indication of how relevant the question still is and if the answer was a solution or not. There is no accepted answer and no update by the author if the problem persists or if the question was just abandoned.
• The question is often of the nature "I have a very urgent question, because I made a typo in my code and now it does not compile, please help!" - Which means it is clearly irrelevant today, because no other will make the same typo and the code is certainly fixed by now.
• The answer to the question was found within the first hour or so, the author confirmed that everything works fine now, but accepting an answer is only possible after 48 hours. - No wonder that there are so many forgotten topics without accepted answer...
• The single answer to the question happens to be from the author itself, but was not accepted.
• Or there is no answer, but a lot of comments on the question which pretty much answer the question, or show that the author did not bother to update it anymore, so there is actually nothing to do there.
• Most certainly it is not the case that this question has multiple answers, of which one is upvoted to be "the best answer". - Of course not, because this state would remove it from the "unanswered" queue, and an answerer will not see those questions (which is a good thing).

As answerer you can:

• Add a comment to the author, to please check the answers, accept the only one and close the topic. - Which is almost hopeless, especially if the topic is older than a year.
• Provide a new answer, which leaves a bad taste of wasted time, because you obivously post on a question which is not really relevant anymore.
• And what you really want to do is mark the question as "closed", "done", "answered", "not relevant anymore", so that it will not appear in the filtered queue anymore, when searching for new questions to answer. You want to help other potential answerers to not waste any time there, because there is nothing to improve. You will not gain any reputation there.
• You can resort to downvoting, trying to indicate a irrelevancy of the question. - Which is not the intended way to handle things (according to the other posts here; but different in others).
• You can flag the question, asking moderator help to close the topic... which will be declined, because "marking a question as solved" is somehow not in the Stackoverflow-question-lifecycle. Rather a "leave everything open-ended, let each and every answerer check that question all over again, and leave every reader in doubt if the question has a solution or not"-state.

In my opinion, these are all dead questions, which somehow should be able to go out of the filter/queue/pool of questions-to-be-answered.

Now, I learned here that the way to go would be to upvote the/an answer to get it off the "unanswered status" - How counter-intuitive!

• If there is no answer, you can provide one, but you are not allowed to upvote your own answer... - You are stuck.
• If there is one answer, how on earth should you know that upvoting that will remove the question from the pools? Because... if there is an answer, how can it be in the "unanswered" state, and be eligible to be reviewed by every potential answerer? Also, why should you upvote an answer which at least fullfills the standards, but you have no clue about the "usefulness", because that insight can only be provided by the author?

I can see the need and the potential for improving the options of a question to get it off the "this is a new question, please invest time on it" search results.

Either by providing something like a "closed" state (which is not barred behind a 6000 Rep limit). Or improving the search function for answerers (for example with a "pristine" filter option to find those questions which are brand new and open to receive some TLC). Alternatively, providing at least an "hide this question for me"-option, might help somewhat.