23
Please consider accepting a good answer, even if it does not (possibly) give you what you asked for
I have to say I completely disagree with this. Accepting an answer is saying that that answer solved the OP's issue. If no answer solves it, then none should be accepted. Sure, it would be nice to get that extra 15 rep that comes with an accept but, as the OP,...
22
As pointed out by Mark Kirby, you can't effectively call on a particular user from a post they haven't yet commented on or edited, because an @user will not send them a notification. See this Meta Stack Exchange answer for details of when comment notifications are triggered.
If you want to seek help from high rep users*, you can always find a few lurking in ...
19
It's up to the person who asked to determine the best answer, and many times the person never comes back to check to see if newer answers get better.
I wouldn't worry about it, the community will vote the good answers to the top and I would think that most people reading a question will look at a few of the answers instead of quitting at the first one, ...
19
Usually, nothing. If the other answer is flat out wrong, downvote it and leave a comment explaining why. You can also leave a comment for the OP informing them of why it's wrong.
If the other answer is just less correct than yours but not wrong, do nothing. The OP is free to accept whichever answer they prefer. If your answer is considered better by the ...
19
Accepts are a way to indicate what worked best for the OP or which answer they personally liked. Sometimes the OP's choice isn't the best one - after all, many people ask questions because they don't know much about the topic, so they can't necessarily be expected to be a good judge. Also, sometimes better answers are posted later after the OP has stopped ...
18
Try to accept whatever has helped you the most. That's what it's supposed to mean but it's really down to your interpretation.
Timeliness could well be part of that utility and I know —from painful experience— that there are a lot of very good answers that haven't been accepted because they're an hour or two late to the pack.
But if we're talking minutes ...
17
If user A comes along and answers your question, and you accept it, he gets 15 reputation. If user B then adds an answer and you accept his answer instead, user A will lose 15 reputation and user B will gain 15 reputation.
This can cause hard feelings (it is amazing how much people care about stupid internet points!) so what I recommend is waiting awhile ...
16
Honestly? Just don't do it.
The OP gets notified about every new answer to their question, so you can assume they've either seen it already or they have no interest in checking their notifications. Promoting your answer to them, however politely, is likely to come across as unnecessary hassling. They might feel it would be rude to unaccept an answer and ...
12
You can mark it as the accepted answer.
It's not automatic though. There are scenarios where you might have multiple options to accomplish the same thing. You might prefer somebody else's answer (and mark that as accepted) but still want your answer available to other people.
In terms of reputation, you don't get the +2 for marking an answer to your ...
12
The one you prefer, the one you end up using. It's completely up to you.
Acceptance is very personal, it's your question. Accept whichever answer you want.
12
Obsolete Answer Flag
In many cases the answer with the most upvotes is simply the one that has been here longest. Often these high vote answers are totally obsolete and no longer work.
It was much easier to get votes in the old days, when Ask Ubuntu was new and unique. Answers did not need to be very good to get lots of upvotes.
There should be an obsolete ...
11
If both answers are correct, you might also consider how the respondent approached the problem, how efficient the solution is, and how they presented it. Of course, this might be overthinking, but if both answers satisfy the criteria you might exted the criteria. Among other things, leave a comment telling why you chose a particular answer. Personally , I'm ...
11
General answer
There are different "schools" on AU, and below is just my perception.
Personally, I would have mixed feelings to accept my own answer, if it is based on the good work and research of someone else. If what I end up using is mostly an edited version of the existing answer, I would probably either:
ask/suggest an edit or addition to ...
9
The help page What should I do when someone answers my question? provides a single guideline for the selection of the accepted answer (emphasis by me):
Choose one answer that you believe is the best solution to your problem.
I think there are valid arguments for either answer but ultimately it’s up to your judgement which one you find more helpful.
Imho ...
8
From my limited experience looking for solutions (especially programming related on Stack Overflow), I have noticed that the accepted answers are not generally useful for my case. This could be due to different versions of software used by the original questioner and newer features have been built over the time, which makes the accepted answer less useful ...
7
I think it should be clear by now that you should always accept my answers.
Seriously, Meta is mostly about discussion. That means it is to find, if possible, some kind of consensus, within the scope of the site, and to find out which opinion(s) possibly exist in the community.
Therefore downvotes, upvotes and acceptance or not, those are almost by ...
7
My answer would be that you shouldn't, and I must say both as the one who asks, as well as the author of the accepted answer, I'd consider it a kind of a contempt.
while anyone has the right to vote for (or against) the quality of an answer, it is the exclusive privilege of the one who asks to accept whichever answer he or she considers most useful. OP ...
7
You got another 15 rep because your answer was accepted. See https://askubuntu.com/help/whats-reputation for details about reputation. The relevant bit here is:
You gain reputation when:
[ . . . ]
answer is marked “accepted”: +15 (+2 to acceptor)
7
Using Mitch's comment as an answer, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't ask the poster of the comment to post it as an answer. Only if he or she will not convert it into an answer in a reasonable amount of time, you can, for clarity reasons on a Q&A site, post it as an answer yourself. Even then I would refer to the one who answered it to start with....
7
If it's really early in the vetting process (not a lot of activity/voting around your post), it may be acceptable to retract and "fix" your original answer. But long after the fact (after the original material has already been vetted and voted on), I'd have to put that under "not okay."
Edits are designed to improve, correct, or clarify specific issues with ...
7
Accepts can have a different function on meta, highlighting a definitive statement from SE staff or indicating what line of action was actually taken at the conclusion of a discussion. I talked about the difference between the meaning of accepts on main vs. meta here in chat.
In the case of support questions the accept often has a similar meaning to on the ...
6
Short answer: nothing. It's up to OP to choose which answer to mark as the accepted answer.
But this doesn't imply that such answer is the best.
First of all because being objective, the choice of the accepted answer it's just up to OP's opinion. People sometimes make mistakes and sometimes don't have enough expertise to correctly determine whether an ...
5
we have mixed fruit salad situation here.
I am a new user , I have a question about Ubuntu , I heard about AskUbuntu and I posted here. I dont give a s**t about terms&conditions. I got what I want and I will leave. No accepting No Upvoting.
I am a user of AskUbuntu and I know few good people are ought here to help with my problem. Somebody posted ...
5
Neither system is perfect. The problem with vote totals deciding the "best answer" (by sort order, at least) is that they are momentum that is hard to overcome in the event that things change. And with the age of some questions (on most of the Stack sites), a new answer can come along that makes much more sense today than the top voted answer of ...
4
Don't worry about it. :)
If your answer is wrong or misleading, you can - of course - delete it. But in this case, your answer is fine. Users are encouraged to accept an answer, and it's good when they do.
There are lots of questions where the accepted answer has fewer upvotes than the top answer, which is fine as well.
4
Nope, moderators cannot mark answers as accepted, only the person who asked the original question can do that...
However once an answer gets a net score of >= 1 the question is considered answered by the system and removed from the count of unanswered questions. So, with cleanup in mind, all the question needs is an answer with an upvote.
4
As muru says, this is up to you.
If you're looking for criteria for accepting answers suggested in official resources, there's What should I do when someone answers my question?:
Choose one answer that you believe is the best solution to your
problem.
What does it mean when an answer is "accepted"?, also in the help center, weighs in on this too:
...
4
Ultimately, accepting is your personal stamp of approval. It is something only you can do. Therefore, other things being equal, it should be the answer that you like the most. What criteria you use to select that is, of course, entirely up to you.
For example, I personally would accept David's answer, since it is easy to remember and concise, making it the ...
4
As the author of the original answer you based yours on, I personally have no problem with you accepting your own if it better served your needs.
I will admit to a bit of confusion on my part when I saw the accept come and go and come and go, but that's not really relevant.
The most important thing to me is that questions get quality answers and the site ...
3
Also see https://askubuntu.com/reputation
It is a personal text based aggregated view of all your rep.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible