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On the philosophy of accepting answers for other people

The last couple of days I've been seeing strings of questions on the Answers Forum where the change is listed as "Accepted an answer" by a single user.

I'm conflicted about this as it seems we're sending mixed messages; I can see where we'd want to point out what looks like a good answer (OTOH isn't that what the Most Helpful Answer is for?), but to me the point of an accepted answer is to indicate that the given answer did indeed fix the problem for the original question.

It's not clear to me that marking an answer as accepted is helping, since most of the time we have no way of knowing if it actually worked for the OP or not. My inclination is to discourage that practice, but I'd be interested in what others think.

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@dadibrokeit I hear what you are saying. It would be great if OP's would come back to accept or at least comment on their answers. As you know this does not happen. Let me quote @amber here "

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:

  1. They let the Original Poster decide and share which post helped them.
  2. They let subsequent readers know which post helped the OP." from here

So, if you see an answer that could be, sounds like, or even know that it is the correct, or is at least a reasonably possible answer, marking it and leaving it for 4 other users to decided, I believe it would meet those criteria. At least that answer has had multiple set of eyes on it. I am not ok with any one of "us" accepting any answer by just one person, unless it is the OP, or even accepting our own answers. Whenever you see this "listed as "Accepted an answer" by a single user" check the history on that question and see if there is at least 4 others that looked at it and voted on it.

This "we have no way of knowing if it actually worked for the OP or not" is most certainly possible. My concern with leaving everything just sit there for decades without any kind of vote, without any kind of solution, can be a distractor for anyone looking for an answer to a similar issues or maybe even the same device. IMHO a forum that has answers but no verified solutions, or where some do not even have a single vote on it, it's a pretty meaningless and not a very useful answer for anyone else. To me it all comes down to how involved we all are with this. It all comes down to our own voting records etc. We are no different then most OP's. We post stuff and then just leave it. To me, that just feels a lot like the way AI forums run. I would dislike for Answers to follow the bad examples of Yahoo Answers or even Quora etc.

We have had plenty of discussions, in one form or another, on here for pretty much over a decade on this subject i.e. How to improve Scoring and Accepting questions, Short and non informative answers accepted by OP vs a detailed answer and a few others.

Again, this is just my opinion and I am okay with whatever decisions we all want to make on this.

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9 Comments:

I think as a concession is whoever is last to vote on it has to comment it was a completion vote.

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@nick or automate this that whenever an answer gets accepted by a vote, that it shows some sort of community emblem vs the last voter as accepted.

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That said, I have a different suggestion for regulars like me and you. If I forget because bypassing W11 requirements on a borderline Zen PC that's 10 years old and lacks Zen+ and it doesn't exactly take precedent until I have ~3 months left, ping the author - if it's a one hit wonder, we may have to step in.

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@oldturkey03 That could be an option - but as a bridge solution, last voter should comment.

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@nick you let me know what you want to look at and we'll get it done. Keeping everything neat and tidy :-)

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Jerry Wheeler will be eternally grateful.