8
$\begingroup$

Sometimes a comment will suffice to answer a person's question. This may be because they are only missing one small step in the argument, or because they can be pointed to a resource that answers their question fully.

In such cases, it could be a good idea to be able to accept a comment as the answer to the question, in the same way that answers can already be accepted. (It may not be appropriate to award 15 reputation points in this case, however).

The advantage here would be that questions answered by comments could then be removed from the 'unanswered questions' section, making it easier for other users to identify which questions still need to be resolved.

What are your thoughts on this?

Cheers Frank.

$\endgroup$
3
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ I'm pretty sure this has been discussed before and was rejected by the SE team. If you see a comment answer, you can always leave an answer yourself (make it CW so you don't look like you're gaming for rep) with credit to the user who left the comment. There is a chat room (the crusade of answers) where you can solicit an upvote to remove the question from the queue. $\endgroup$
    – Alex Becker Mod
    Commented Apr 10, 2014 at 21:00
  • $\begingroup$ OK, thanks. What were the reasons for the rejection? Can the discussion still be found? $\endgroup$
    – Frank
    Commented Apr 10, 2014 at 21:02
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ What should one do when one's question has been answered in the comments? $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Apr 11, 2014 at 5:45

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
17
$\begingroup$

This has been discussed previously here at meta.SO. The consensus was that the feature would not be useful, and would undermine the answer/comment divide.

$\endgroup$
5
$\begingroup$

As stated above, for good or ill accepting comments isn't something we're going to be able to do. However, note that when a question is answered in the comments (despite the fact that that's not what comments are for) and nobody "steps up" to the plate, this presents a great opportunity for the OP: rephrase the comments in an answer of their own.

Commenting on Alex Becker's comment (appropriately), this is the one case in which I think turning comments into an answer does not necessarily warrant CW-ifying: if the OP can synthesize the new information they've been given well enough to write it up in their own words, they have earned some Shiny Internet Pointz. (IMO a high-rep user should still CW-ify such an answer, though.)

That said, obviously such an answer still does need to $(i)$ give credit to the original comments it's drawing on and $(ii)$ not just copy-paste those comments.

$\endgroup$
-6
$\begingroup$

I really think we need to accept comments as answers.

Perhaps, once a comment is accepted as an answer, it can get automatically duplicated as an answer, and a link to it is shown from the comment?

$\endgroup$

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .