Why don't we see more self-answered questions?

Question

As many of you know, I love this community and try and contribute where I can.

My personal philosophy is that ..

• If I run into a problem using Salesforce
• Where the answer doesn't come to me through a more or less linear diagnostic approach
• And where the answer can't be found using search tools or (re)reading the doc
• And where I eventually (hours or days later) figure out the issue with a solution

Then

• I will post a question and self-answer and thus leave a legacy for others, if only selfishly, as I may have the same issue years later and will have long forgotten how it was solved.

Now, where I am puzzled and this is not meant to be an admonition, is why I don't see more of this approach? Surely some of the rest of the mavens have been stymied for a while and then arrived at a solution worthy of contribution?

Of course, we are all busy and I can see a ton of time goes into helping others with well-thought answers. Again, not an admonition.

Or does the community see my self-answered questions as narcissistic and wish I would stop?

Answer 1

I do self-Q&A as appropriate, but those are rare. One thing that I've noticed is that most Q&A tends to not get a lot of upvotes for whatever reason, so maybe there's little incentive for them to be posted. That said, it would be nice if more people would check questions that already have answers and see if they're worth upvoting or not. I would encourage people who aren't very avid voters to go out of their way and upvote more questions.

Answer 2

Late answer, but I think this question is worth answering.

I think people see self answer questions as defeating the point of asking a community - why ask others to answer when you already know it? When I see a quality self answer as something that adds to the value of this community.

We've all had a moment where we find a post about a problem we have and theres that comment "oh I fixed it nvm" and no other context - and its beyond frustrating. So I try to make sure all my questions have some kind of answer and are useful to future readers. Its why I tried to get rep in the first place - to contribute to a quality stack of questions and answers.

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Looking at a my self answered questions, theres both more than I expected (11/29!!), and most of them are specific to my org & the work I needed to do.

Most of my self answers are, well, for myself - I find myself in google searches all the time.

The biggest reasons I can see are (in no meaningful order):

1. I need this solution for future reference
2. There are no other questions/posts about this
3. No other answers/comments
4. Adds extra context for future readers
5. I figured it out before anyone else did

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Lets go down the list!

Provided my own solution, but my answer doesn't describe the root issue (day light savings time), so I didn't accept my own answer.

DateTime.addMonths skips a month (from feb to mar)

Deleted record was causing access problems - had to use ALL ROWS - no other answers or comments.

Unable to edit/view Archived Task when using VF Override

Very specific bug with a dupe ID that the parser didn't catch - couldn't find any other documentation about it.

ActionFunction doesn't rerender output panel

Added a solution I figured out while working on the issue thats an "elegant" fix, but not what I ended up using. My problem was really not a problem!

Get type of record from standard controller without accessing record?

This one was a weird bug with targeting an element by id and I didn't find it anywhere else. My solution was to replace the failing standard behavior using other standard components - a good reference for a fringe bug.

Polymorphic Lookup fails to disable other fields on page

Would have answered this one as well, but it was a lengthy solution & probably closer to proprietary code than demo code for stack.

Make Chatter Profile Photo available externally?

This one was bizarre. It was hard to search for, and I didn't find a single other post about it. My solution is closer to a hack (directly changing UI settings via API) than anything else.

"Show Custom Logo in Meeting Requests" option missing?

Super basic mistakes, but hard to find in a search - name your param's!

Unnamed Apex:Param tag causes generated javascript function to have a syntax error

No answers, no comments - not a problem other people worry about. Put a comment with an easy fix.

ActionStatus only affects a single PageBlockButton, not both

Same pattern - no other answers, no comments, easy fix.

Lookup with filters fails to display records on visualforce page

Good answer, but the real problem is an org specific behavior.

Why is my locked record editable?

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I don't think I've ever found a problem I couldn't solve on my own that wasn't referenced somewhere else - I end up putting all the info into a question, post it, and then keep working - feeling confident that if I can't fix it, someone else might be able to help.