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I see a lot of questions in the site which have been answered but the answer is NOT marked as Best answer by the OP.

I feel there is a need "to notify/prompt the OP" to know that he/she forgot to mark the answer as Best answer as I (hope there are many others like me) personally DON'T like to comment something like "Hey, if this answer helps you, please mark the answer as the right one so we can close the question" everytime.

Instead, I feel, there should be a button on the question, upon clicking will notify the question owner with a similar notification that we get in our SE inbox when someone comments (something like below).

enter image description here

The questions remain though about the button:

1. Who should be eligible for clicking the button?

  • The user who answered the question?
  • Users with certain reputation?

2. When should the button be available?

  • Always?
  • Only after at least 1 answer is written?
  • Disable it once it has been used i.e., only once per question, the OP can be notified?

What do you all think? Would love to hear from you all.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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If you ask me, the system should have an Accepted Answer review process. Several possible suggestions follow.

Community Accepted vs. Poster Accepted

Allow two "accepted" answers: one by the original poster, and one by the community, which can be set, cleared, or changed by a formal review process requiring X votes. Periodically, as technology changes, one answer is often invalidated and a new answer should take its place. Unfortunately, under the current system, it's not possible to suggest this except by comments, and answers that are accepted are protected. The community at large should be able to influence this instead of placing the burden on the original poster. The community accepted mark does not bear any associated rep points, but helps guide visitors to the correct answer.

Unaccepted or Incorrect Answer Review Process

Allow the community to set, clear, or change the accepted answer by a review. Flag the answer that should be correct and allow the community to review it into acceptance. To reduce the odds of abuse, answers set, cleared, or changed in this manner don't modify the rep of the original or new answer owners. It would be really cool if "Community" (the automated user) could periodically randomly choose questions and answers for review so that reviewers can determine if the answers are still (probably) valid as well or if an accepted answer should be set.

Flag to Prompt Original Poster

Instead of leaving comments, allow the answer to be flagged as a possible accepted answer. If the review passes, send a message to the original poster's comment feed prompting them to select an answer. Of course, this still leaves burden on the original poster to do the right thing, but it avoids the hassle of comments. Under this option, the original poster can choose to accept or deny the answer (perhaps because it didn't answer their question satisfactorily, etc), but if they do nothing in a reasonable time period (perhaps because they've never logged back in, etc), consider marking the answer as accepted.

Free for All

A question and answer that's been abandoned (neither have been touched in at least 30 days or so) will be flagged for review automatically, and the community can choose the correct answer through the review process. Alternatively, once the abandoned state has occurred, anyone with sufficient rep can set, clear, or change the accepted flag. No rep changes will occur to the original or new answer owners as a result of this change.

I'd be okay with any of these solutions, or any other similar solutions that allow the community to ping the original poster privately and/or allow a consensus among trusted users or a vote by moderators.

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  • 2
    I like the Flag to Prompt Original Poster or Free for All (which I might rename to Wisdom of the Elders)
    – cropredy
    May 23, 2016 at 22:41
  • If it's a community review, I think it would need to be reviewed by users with more than 10k or 15k rep and perhaps the number of votes should be increased beyond 5 as the forum grows. Not certain on the latter for the moment, but definitely a much higher rep than other queues. Unfortunately, we don't have enough 20k rep users to set the bar that high. We have a number of users that are approaching that level though.
    – crmprogdev
    May 25, 2016 at 14:49
  • @crmprogdev I purposely avoided giving specific values in my answer, but I definitely agree that we need to start at a pretty high value to see if the process works or not. We can start high (say, 15k), then adjust down as we review the data about if the process is working and how we can refine it. 20k might be unrealistic now, as that's a whole 7 users, which means we'd all be reviewing each other. Unless you're suggesting we start this off as a "beta" test before we lower the bar to a more reasonable level?
    – sfdcfox
    May 25, 2016 at 15:17
  • I wasn't suggesting anything specific, only that the criteria for being able to vote would need to require that a user to have earned significant reputation. Since I don't work with every product or feature, there are certain topics like exact target where unless it was really obvious, I wouldn't want to pick a "best answer" as I know I likely couldn't answer the question or know if it was correct. I'd pass on those and leave it to others with the knowledge to vote on the best answer. I'd like to think others have the discipline to do that as well, but will they?
    – crmprogdev
    May 25, 2016 at 15:49
  • @crmprogdev You bring up an excellent point. Perhaps the "best answer" feature should be limited by tag badges? Like, I could suggest an answer for apex, but not for exacttarget? This would let community leaders on specific topics manage those types of answers irrespective of rep?
    – sfdcfox
    May 25, 2016 at 15:57
  • I think you're onto something there. Perhaps there needs to be a combination of rep and tag badges. If you have the rep, but not the tag badge, then you can't vote on the best answer. Never mind that the question may not be properly tagged, but I won't go down that rabbit hole. ;)
    – crmprogdev
    May 25, 2016 at 16:01
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That of course is based on the OP feeling that the answer provided (or one of the answers provided if multiples) is actually the best answer or even actually answers the question.

I really dislike answers where the person answering has put in any kind of 'please mark this as the best answer' type of comment as that seems too much like trying to gather rep rather than providing the best answers you can and allowing for the community voting for the good answers to let the quality of information be rewarded.

Potentially if an answer has received a certain number of upvotes then it should be automatically marked as answering the question as it shows that the community has been getting value from that answer. That would then pose the question of how many upvotes would be the number to mark it as a 'best answer'.

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  • There are separate discussions around here about that sort of comment, but the point here is that we wouldn't have to clutter the post with comments. It actually increases the value to the community of both the question and the answer if the best answer is accepted. Granted, this button would be ripe for abuse, but I think if you couldn't hit it for several days after the fact, that would lessen the point-mongering aspect.
    – Adrian Larson Mod
    May 18, 2016 at 16:45
  • With the ever increasing volume of posts, it's also very difficult for people to read all posts and vote on them. Take a look at the Users>Voters by Month. Right now there are 2 pages + 1 user that have cast 10 or more votes this month. This Quarter there 4 pages + 2 rows. That's out of a total of a bit over 20,000 users. There are times when someone can expend a LOT of effort helping someone solve their issue and not receive any votes (or very few), yet they've really helped someone out with their issue plus helped them learn something.
    – crmprogdev
    May 25, 2016 at 14:44

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