Mark Self Answered postings accordingly

Question

Summary

I think it would be beneficial to mark self answered posts, where people only "ask" the question in order to share their knowledge/findings, in a way so that it is obvious to everyone checking the question out that this is not really a question that is seeking an answer. And most importantly: that the answer given is indeed the one that solves the problem for the person that asked the question.

Why do I think this would be beneficial?

• This would prevent someone from investing time, trying to help OP to find a solution (note that we can only mark our own answer as the correct one after two days (on Stack Overflow) so it is not immediately obvious that the provided answer is sufficient already)
• It could prevent some people from downvoting either the answer or the question itself

Especially the last bit tends to be very frustrating.

The story behind this question

Let's consider an example of mine: Message "error: use of undeclared identifier 'assert'"

At first glance this problem looked like dozens of other questions already posted on Stack Overflow (I know, because I did indeed try to find an answer there before). In my particular case however my situation was slightly different. Therefore after having failed to find a solution with existing Stack Overflow questions, I decided to share my findings after I had figured it out.

The solution turned out to be very specific to my problem, but it seemed reasonable enough that someone else might run into the same issue, so I decided to share it nonetheless.

Me posting this self answered "question" resulted in the following

• My question getting downvoted (as there was no comment made as to why, I have to guess: I think someone saw the question and though "This has been asked here before" and thus downvoted)
• My answer getting downvoted (again without explanation, so here's my guess: The answer doesn't seem to be very general and without taking into account who the question actually asked, it could create the impression as if this was just a pseudo answer trying to catch a few accidental upvotes or something like that)
• Another answer was created (that contained the standard answer for the standard problem, that I however did not have). Given that I wasn't looking for another answer in the first place, this just means that someone invested some time trying to help, where there was nobody actually seeking help.

I think chances are that all of this could have potentially been prevented if the question was marked as Q&A-style immediately after posting.

How could this "marking" look like?

I am not a good UI/UX designer, so there are probably better ideas for this, but here is my suggestion:

• Change the background color of the question and the original author's question to something that is different from the standard background. This should create a connection between the question and the answer that is only present if the question was "asked" in a self answered manner
• Add a label somewhere next to the question stating that this is self answerd-style (optionally including a short explanation of what this means)
• Accept the written answer immediately, so it is clear that the problem has been resolved

Answer 1

I think it would be beneficial to mark self answered posts, where people only "ask" the question in order to share their knowledge/findings, in a way so that it is obvious to everyone checking the question out that this is not really a question that is seeking an answer. And most importantly: that the answer given is indeed the one that solves the problem for the person that asked the question.

There's already a mechanism for this: You can see how many answers a question has, and if you accept your own answer to show that it solved your problem, it will show that your question has an accepted answer. Here are two examples of the MSE questions page: The first one is self-answered, and as such showed up from the beginning with the '1 answer' box. The second one shows what that box looks like when the answer is accepted: it's very green.

In other words: If you don't want to waste your time on already answered questions, you don't have to! You can just click on the ones that have zero answers and aren't closed.

This would prevent someone from investing time, trying to help OP to find a solution (note that we can only mark our own answer as the correct one after two days (on Stack Overflow) so it is not immediately obvious that the provided answer is sufficient already)

Even if you have accepted your answer, this doesn't stop people. This question of mine on Arqade still got another answer after I already wrote AND accepted my own answer.

Like people said in the comments already, your question isn't just there to help you. It's also there to help future visitors. If you have hacked together your own solution that's fine, but if someone else knows a different way of doing the same thing, having a second answer is good. Especially if that answer can explain why it does things differently from your own.

Having people invest time on already answered questions can be good, and should not necessarily be prevented: The first answer isn't always the best one.

It could prevent some people from downvoting either the answer or the question itself

I doubt that. Self-answered questions are the same as regular questions in that regard: Your question and answer should meet the site's standards. Just because you posted it together with an answer doesn't automatically mean your question is a good question for the site.

The kind of self-answered question I see the most is spam, then the next often seen category is low-quality, lacking details or off-topic. Again: Those don't meet the site guidelines, so they get downvotes, close votes, and flags. If your idea is going to prevent that quality control from happening, I'd rather take a pass on having it.