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This is something that bothered the heck out of me on the developer.force.com forums wherein the person who answered the question then prompted the OP to mark the answer as solved in what is thinly-disguised self-aggrandizement.

A recent example of this is here: https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/a/49461/2602

My inclination is to stamp out this behavior with a comment to the comment:

"On SFSE, the etiquette is not to prompt the OP to mark as solved unless you have been engaged in a back-and-forth through comments/chat to get to a solution. Worthy solutions get up-voted by the community."

Thoughts?

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    I don't think so. There are so many good answers that were not accepted. So it is a not bad idea to remind a (new) user to do it. Eventually, it is easier to find a solution on the SFSE if it was accepted / marked as solved. Good answers should be marked as solved!
    – Sergej Utko
    Commented Sep 16, 2014 at 7:21
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    Hmm, maybe I need to come up with a disarming final line to my answers to new users such as "Thanks for posting on SFSE. Community etiquette is to upvote well-thought out posts and answers and to help the rest of the community by marking answers as solved if they truly resolved your issue."
    – cropredy
    Commented Sep 16, 2014 at 14:24
  • @crop I always appreciate your finesse with words :) Ever thought about becoming a writer?
    – crmprogdev
    Commented Sep 18, 2014 at 12:49

4 Answers 4

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I like the idea of teaching new users to accept an answer but I agree that it shouldn't necessarily be the OP. I'd rather see veteran community members jumping in to make that suggestion on other people's posts.

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I can appreciate your distaste for self promotion, yet I often wonder if an answer solved a problem. It seems as though if we're to provide a useful repository of solved Questions for the SalesForce community, we need to somehow politely encourage those who post questions to either mark answers that helped them solve their problem or post their own solutions instead.

Exactly how to do that, I don't know. I don't believe that using sig lines like "If this solves your problem, please mark it as the answer" is in line with how our community works. I felt that was "tacky" on developer.force. But without solved questions, we're not going to provide the service to our community that they're really looking for.

Unfortunately, we don't have a way to send a private message or email to them asking if an answer solved their problem. I'm also not entirely comfortable with the example of what occurred that you posted. Had it come from someone else, other than the one who posted the answer, I might feel different. I look forward to hearing other's suggestions on how we can improve acceptance of answers.

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  • While I too also wish more answers were marked as solutions so they didn't keep popping up periodically in the feed; I have learned that there are many trusted respondents with high reps whose answers, even if not marked as solved, are reliable. I assume others have concluded this as well.
    – cropredy
    Commented Sep 16, 2014 at 14:21
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    Agree with you on that. I'm thinking more in terms of those who come here from the internet following a Google search and may be looking for Questions marked Solved or Questions with Answers. Yesterday, I left a comment asking someone to repost their comment as an answer since it appeared to be the genuine answer to the question.
    – crmprogdev
    Commented Sep 16, 2014 at 15:00
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    I have prompted a user to accept one of my answers, because the user asked another question, quoting code from my answer, so he was clearly using it, so it likely solved his problem. I felt a little uncomfortable about doing that. But I do think it is important for answers to be accepted if they are valid, because otherwise how does the next person to come along know that there's a valid solution? On a popular question, there may be a few answers and one with a lot of upvotes. On most questions there aren't enough upvotes to tell what's good and what isn't.
    – Dominic
    Commented Sep 19, 2014 at 15:02
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It should never be asked for in the actual body of an answer. In the case of question linked to the comment was posted a bit to soon after the answer for my liking but OP is/was a newbie.

Personally I only like to prompt when I see that OP has actually left a comment saying "Thanks, this works!" and then failed to mark the answer as accepted. This seems to happen a surprising amount with newbies who don't read the FAQ and intro to the site. IMO it'd be great if you couldn't perform any interaction on the site until you'd read that stuff.

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If I found a user which has less then 50 reputation then I tell him that about marking the answer "solved". Because a new user may not familiar with site motive and etiquette. I use comment to remind and after few minutes I delete that comment to keep posts clean. I learned it from Stackoverflow.

Users having more than 100 reps don't need to remind. They know it.

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    i think it is fine for an experienced sfse person such as yourself to remind a user to mark an answer as solution -- but after the fact, not as part of the answer itself - which strikes me as self-promotion
    – cropredy
    Commented Sep 23, 2014 at 18:11
  • We have a few users who've managed to accumulate more than 50 points who rarely seem to accept answers or upvote the answers they receive. One user in particular that comes to mind is on a posting "roll" as I write these comments.
    – crmprogdev
    Commented Sep 27, 2014 at 17:43

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