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So after following one of the clickbaitiest hot network answers in some time, I found this comment by the author fairly justified for a couple reasons:

@DhirendrasinhSisodiya If this answer addressed your problem, please consider accepting it by clicking on the check mark/tick to the left of the answer, turning it green. This marks the question as resolved to your satisfaction, and awards reputation both to you and the person who answered. If you have >= 15 reputation points, you may also upvote the answer if you wish. There is no obligation to do either.

  • The OP thanked them very shortly after the Answer was posted.
  • This Question was the OP's first post on the exchange.
  • The message states explicitly that there is no obligation.
  • A couple hours had passed with no further questions.
  • The links are actually quite informative for a new user.
    • Side question, are there shortcuts to linking any of those documents?
  • Good template for us to emulate?
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    That is a good way of addressing the issue of getting answers accepted. I have posted a comment after a thanks from the OP requesting they accept the answer to move it out of the unanswered queue but not added all the other information. It is a good template though so I would go along with using it with a few tweaks.
    – Dave Humm
    Aug 11, 2016 at 7:16
  • @DaveHumm Feel free to add how you would tweak it as an answer! I appreciate your moderation philosophy and would certainly enjoy more insight into it.
    – Adrian Larson Mod
    Aug 16, 2016 at 12:43
  • I see a slippery slope here as while the commenter was not the answer-provider, this kind of verbiage could encourage answer-providers to solicit for points -- something I think the Community has done a good job at stamping out. That said, I could see it being used after a long comment thread where the answer-provider had patiently resolved the OP's question and follow-on questions
    – cropredy
    Aug 16, 2016 at 18:18

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I've been meaning to respond to this. Like others, I enjoy the fact that we don't see or allow the "begging for upvotes" or "mark my answer as accepted" that's done elsewhere as part of an answer. At the same time, we also have a need, if not something of a "responsibility" to educate new users on how the forum works.

I have a few snippets that I use on occasion, mostly when either someone has "thanked me" for answering their question, but hasn't marked it as solved, or when there's been an extended exchange to help them work out their issue; sometimes back and forth over several days without being marked as solved nor receiving an upvote from them (including users with over several hundred rep).

These are what I use, depending on the context and my mood:

  1. Thanks for posting on SFSE. Community etiquette is to upvote well thought out questions and answers if you have sufficient reputation plus help the rest of the community by marking posts as solving your question if they helped you resolve your issue.

  2. Glad you got it worked out. If this post led you to solving your issue, please help the rest of the community by marking it as having answered your question.

  3. You're welcome (username). Community etiquette is to help others by marking your question as solved through checking the answer that resolved your issue. If you don't, it leaves the impression to anyone who searches the topic later that your question wasn't answered to your satisfaction. Once you have sufficient reputation, you can also upvote posts and answers.

In what you've quoted, I like where he explained that reputation is also awarded to the user who asked the question. It seems implicit there's no obligation to mark an answer as solved or to upvote it.

Beyond that, I don't feel the need to provide the links; instead just to convey the gist that the forum benefits when an answer is marked as solved; particularly when users search the forum later for questions with answers that are marked as solved.

I don't do this for the reputation but will say that after spending several days going back and forth with someone helping them with complicated or "messy" code, it's genuinely annoying to discover they don't have the courtesy to acknowledge the effort by at least upvoting the answer (when able) if they don't want to mark it as solved. I've noticed those users questions don't get much attention, not just from me, but from others too. ;)

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    This goes back to the earlier question we had on this. I think it'd still be preferable if Community could prompt the user to do so, perhaps via some sort of private message, but with verbiage along these same lines. This would help us improve answer rates without sounding "needy."
    – sfdcfox
    Aug 15, 2016 at 1:42
  • @sfdcfox Totally agree with you. It's why I don't use any of the above snippets very often.
    – crmprogdev
    Aug 15, 2016 at 11:54

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