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Possible Duplicate:
mark a comment as answer to a question

Some people are too modest and propose a different idea to a question in a comment.

Is it an acceptable idea to provide the user that posted the question with a link that allows such a comment to get promoted into an answer to the question?

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    I regret this question is both declined and closed, supposedly because it is a duplicate of a question that talks about the exact opposite... Strange. I also regret that I couldn't even propose to make it a vote-option or a shortcut to have the issue raised for the moderators to intervene.
    – Stijn Sanders
    Commented Jul 21, 2009 at 20:56
  • Clearly not a duplicate. This would be an excellent feature. I think the implementation should be "promote to answer and accept." If necessary for some reason, it could be a non-voteable answer (15 rep - straight up).
    – Jay
    Commented Jan 27, 2010 at 5:04
  • It looks like this was closed a long time ago for the wrong reason, resulting in someone else re-asking the question here. Also, someone else asked basically the same thing another month later, here. Both this and the second link should probably be closed as dupes of the first link, since that's where the bulk of the discussion is actually at.
    – Pops
    Commented Mar 14, 2011 at 14:32

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If we were to institute this system it is important that it does not lead to a wide array of too-short, or not truly constructive answers. There is a difference between an sufficient answer and a good answer, sometimes.

However, there is not always a difference between an answer short enough to be a comment and originally posted as such, and a good answer.

In the true spirit of democracy, preventing comments from ever becoming answers necessarily limits, in some cases, perfectly adequate and acceptable and constructive answers from being noted as such.

To allow the benefit while mitigating any potential harm, it is then necessary to put some checks or limits upon any such process of comment-promotion.

We already require self-answers to exist for 24 hours prior to their being capable of being accepted as the correct answer. And we already have structures that allow multiple votes to constitute a change, such as closing questions or opening closed questions.

If we were to allow comment promotion under the same principles it may work: Require 24 hours to pass between promotion and admissable acceptance as the answer, and allow downvoting to cancel out a promotion, say 5 downvotes or demote votes would send the answer back to a comment.

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I certainly don't think this should be at the discretion of the question asker. A person could easily abuse this, by "promoting" poor and/or irrelevant comments, and cause that person to get downvoted. Additionally, I'm not sure its needed for the commenter either, if they feel they want to move it to an answer, it is easy enough to do this within the UI already, I don't think there needs to be additional support.

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Overall I think this is looking for a potentially complicated feature which would not get used enough (or could possibly be abused) and would leave to a LOT of non-answer comments becoming answers.

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