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Resolving questions in which the poster figures it out but disappears

So there are a few questions here where the Poster figures out a solution, but doesn't post it as an Answer, only as a comment or edit, such as seen here, and here. Obviously this poses some problems as a) the question is still marked as Unresolved (and/or No Answers), and someone can't see the correct answer to the problem. The problem appears when the Users have left and forgotten about iFixit and do not reappear, thus leaving these issues as permanent. My question is: what is a good way to resolve this issue? I was thinking that if you iFixit guys have a way to post from others' accounts that would work, you could post the Answer from that person's account and then accept it, thus remedying the problem.

Answered! View the answer I have this problem too

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Here's another example, what I've been doing myself is copying and pasting their answer, then answering it and saying "Original Poster's own solution:"

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Oh and I've also been adding comments to tell them just in case they come back with something along the lines of:

Hi, first off, good job solving it yourself, but can you please post your solution as an Answer and accept it, rather than a comment, so that this can be removed from the Unresolved and No Answers section? Thanks

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As I come across them I'll do the same.

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That's a reasonable technique.

It would be better to have the original poster own the answer, but your mechanism is a fair stop-gap. Someone would need to vote up your post for it to move out of unresolved.

We have a moderator feature for switching answers to comments, but not the other way around. I'll get working on that so we can just do it.

Eventually we'll give community moderators access to tools like this.

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Sounds good

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If others are voting up those old posts answers (or voting down the "sort of" questions) then more of the "unresolved" questions will be resolved one way or another.

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I'd like for community moderators to be able to switch the comment to an answer, vote it up, and mark it as accepted (since the original poster has essentially accepted his own answer). Perhaps the option to mark an answer as accepted (or to toggle the accepted status) should be opened up to anyone with enough reputation after:

  1. a question has received one or more up-voted answers, and
  2. seen no activity from the original poster for a certain amount of time.

The original poster should, however, always have the final say.

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You can't vote up your own answer so while you can turn the comment into an answer you can't vote it up.''' In some cases the OP has created an answer, of course that can be voted up.

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Comment to answer switching definitely needs to be done. As for your other idea Shawn, I hadn't thought about that. We could definitely Check to see when the asking user last visited the site and if it was too long ago, open up answer accepting to everyone.

The issue I have with this is that on occasion they are waiting for a better answer. In all honesty, I'm pretty ok with their being questions with no accepted answers, as long as there are votes on the question and answer.

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Shawn, I agree with you, and will be implementing something like this soon.

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Sterling, that seems fine, but make sure there is a high reputation limit. I'm thinking 10k...

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Sounds like a good idea

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rab777hp will be eternally grateful.