Looks like we had a busy weekend! We always love hearing from all of you, and seeing conversations on how to better our community unfold. I think we can all agree that we want what’s best for the community, and importantly, what gets more things fixed! So I’m hoping to lay out some guidelines for the “fixing more things” part, and hopefully we can help the community part feel a bit better, too—this is a huge undertaking and we can only do it when we work together. As always, please let me know if you’d like to discuss anything further than what I go into here.
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[quote]“Is it acceptable for a moderator to accept his/her own answer at any time? Regardless of if it is the only answer, or one of few/many?”[/quote]
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“Is it acceptable for a moderator to accept his/her own answer at any time? Regardless of if it is the only answer, or one of few/many?”
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We’ve played a bit fast and loose with Accepted Answers in the past, but I think a formal definition and policy is a good idea.
Accepted Answers do two things:
# They let the Original Poster decide and share which post helped them.
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They let subsequent readers know which post helped the OP.
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# They let subsequent readers know which post helped the OP.
For everything else, there’s upvotes. Upvotes tell readers which posts are the most useful to the overall community, and if answers change over time, so can the votes.
In this case, accepting your own posts—unless OP specifically comments “this worked” and fails to mark the post—is not the intended purpose of the Accepted Answer. Obviously, in a perfect world, every poster would come back, report their outcome, and thank the person who solved their problem, that’s unfortunately not something we can control. If there’s an outlying case that ''really'' needs attention, feel free to post the question to Meta and our Community team can decide if we force accept that answer.
But! We would like to do something about posts that never get marked as Solved. We’ll be working on making “Most Helpful Answer” posts trigger the “Accepted” status of solved posts. In that case, the community has collectively agreed that it is, indeed, the best solution for that specific issue.
There was a lot going on in this discussion, so please let me know if I’ve missed anything you specifically want addressed.
Looks like we had a busy weekend! We always love hearing from all of you, and seeing conversations on how to better our community unfold. I think we can all agree that we want what’s best for the community, and importantly, what gets more things fixed! So I’m hoping to lay out some guidelines for the “fixing more things” part, and hopefully we can help the community part feel a bit better, too—this is a huge undertaking and we can only do it when we work together. As always, please let me know if you’d like to discuss anything further than what I go into here.
[quote]“Is it acceptable for a moderator to accept his/her own answer at any time? Regardless of if it is the only answer, or one of few/many?”[/quote]
We’ve played a bit fast and loose with Accepted Answers in the past, but I think a formal definition and policy is a good idea.
Accepted Answers do two things:
# They let the Original Poster decide and share which post helped them.
They let subsequent readers know which post helped the OP.
For everything else, there’s upvotes. Upvotes tell readers which posts are the most useful to the overall community, and if answers change over time, so can the votes.
In this case, accepting your own posts—unless OP specifically comments “this worked” and fails to mark the post—is not the intended purpose of the Accepted Answer. Obviously, in a perfect world, every poster would come back, report their outcome, and thank the person who solved their problem, that’s unfortunately not something we can control. If there’s an outlying case that ''really'' needs attention, feel free to post the question to Meta and our Community team can decide if we force accept that answer.
But! We would like to do something about posts that never get marked as Solved. We’ll be working on making “Most Helpful Answer” posts trigger the “Accepted” status of solved posts. In that case, the community has collectively agreed that it is, indeed, the best solution for that specific issue.
There was a lot going on in this discussion, so please let me know if I’ve missed anything you specifically want addressed.
Thank you all for all you do![br]
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