I guess this might have been already covered somewhere on the Meta, but I have no idea on how to search for it - if so, please point me to that question.

---

My problem is that I've noticed that since several weeks I get very often upset about answers, that are really great, **but are not marked as accepted.** In case the user has 1 rep, and it seems that he'd have never touched the site again after he had asked the question, I can excuse them. But if the user who asked has ~100 or even ~600 rep points, and he **actually comments that this answer worked/helped him perfectly**, but **does not mark the answer as accepted**, I find that a bit worrying.

 - The first reason is that AU would be somehow easier to maintain if the questions that are answered and solved were actually marked as such.
 - Another thing is that very often these answers are written by users of 50-300 rep points, and in their case the +15 points they would get if the answer was accepted **really matters**, and is also a factor that encourages them to contribute to AU further. *(I feel like writing obvious things, but I have a strange need to explain my idea clearly ;-) )*
 - And of course, in case of users that have 500+ rep points, such cases lower their accept rate, and they definitely do not want so, but probably do not know about that.

I guess that the cause may be that they are either not aware of the possibility to accept answers, or are not aware of why this is important *(It's not that they are ignoring it completely, because very often they sort of accept it by writing a comment of praise, relief, or express thankfulness)*. Usually I write a comment, encouraging to use the grey/green button left to their favorite answer, with a short as possible explanation of why it is good to do so.

Yet I am not sure if my approach is right, and would like to consult how to deal with such cases. Should I even care? And if yes, is there any effective way of encouraging such users to accept the answer they like?