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So, the Community User has the great functionality of pinging unanswered questions to get them on the front page so that active users can help answer them. This is a great idea! However, it seems that the Community User actually pings questions without accepted answers.

Much like our lack of upvoting in this community, we have a lot of questions that are answered but never marked as accepted. The result of this is that whenever I log in, my front page is often filled with questions with correct answers already there, and it's harder for me to find questions that actually need love.

Is there any way to adjust this behavior so that our front page has more new questions that need answer? Is there a way to start accepting definitely good answers on questions that the asker may have abandoned?

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    just my view.. I always first go to /questions?sort=newest instead of active questions
    – Vamsi Krishna Gosu
    Jul 27, 2015 at 5:13
  • @VamsiKrishna For the longest time, I tended to do the same, however that didn't allow me nearly as many opportunities to upvote other people's answers. I now tend to switch around between the two views. Not certain that they're really being pinged so much as being edited. At least I'm seeing a lot of community edits. If an individual is indeed pinging posts to the front of the queue, is that a violation of TOS?
    – crmprogdev
    Aug 1, 2015 at 4:34

2 Answers 2

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I think this brings up an issue that I've been noticing lately - we have a lot of unaccepted answers on the site. If you take a look, in many instances, it would appear that the answer(s) provided is perfectly valid.

I think we need to train people to be more willing to accept an answer if it answers the question.

This will improve the quality of the site and also help alleviate the problem highlighted above.

EDIT I have always thought that the main SO site had a better accept rate and I decided to crunch the numbers. It turns out that this IS true, but not by much.

2197148 Accepted
1534240 Not Accepted
2197148/(2197148+1534240)*100 = 58.8%


5328 Not Accepted
7014 Accepted
7014/(5328+7014)*100 = 56.8%

So yes, we can lift our game, but we aren't doing too bad by comparison.

Or perhaps this is just an issue that affect all SO sites in general.

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I don't think we can change that functionality - StackExchange owns it and as far as I know is site agnostic. You'll need to work with the existing views (newest/frequent/active/unanswered).

Also, I'm not sure if the moderators have that capability to accept answers on those type of questions that have been sitting open for a while and have multiple answers, but no activity for long period of time. Though, if a question does not have a "proper" answer then I think it should be still open and unanswered.

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    You're right, mods can't accept answers or un-mark accepted ones. In terms of stats questions do get counted as answered if they've had no activity for a period of time and one answer stands out in terms of votes, that doesn't help with the filtering though methinks.
    – Matt Lacey Mod
    Jul 28, 2015 at 5:57
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    This is one situation where the ability for a "moderator to choose a best answer" is one drawback to this site compared to Salesforce.Success or the Dev Forums. However, that one feature doesn't outweigh the many other usability features and benefits that come with being here on the SE platform that both SF.Success and the SF Developer Forums just don't possess.
    – crmprogdev
    Aug 1, 2015 at 4:30

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