# Should I have 'accepted' another answer?

I'm trying to figure out what type of answer I should generally mark as 'accepted' on my questions.

In my last question, I accepted the answer that was the most helpful to me, personally, even though I noticed that the other answer was more concise, and therefore some users would probably prefer it.

By now, several more votes were cast and they all went to the answer I didn't 'accept', which makes me wonder if I didn't chose appropriately according to the MSE unwritten rules.

Alternatively I thought, maybe the additional votes on the other answer are to "make up" for the missing 'accepted' tag. But I'm speculating. Any guidance on this would be appreciated.

• You can accept whichever answer you want to, regardless of how the voting goes. But do try to acknowledge every answer you found helpful, by voting for it and/or specifically mentioning it in a comment. Jun 9 '15 at 12:23
• I did. Voted it up, said thanks in comment, and gave a short reason why I accepted the other answer. Still, I get the feeling I'm being ungrateful maybe, or I made a mistake, which is why I asked on here. Jun 9 '15 at 12:26
• We all make mistakes. We do the best we can. Don't worry about it. Move on. Jun 9 '15 at 12:29
• You can find some older discussions about this if you look at this question and the questions linked from/to it. Or you could simply browse the questions tagged (accepted-answer) to find older related posts. Jun 9 '15 at 13:25
• Some questions will get two kinds of answers: some very short and densely packed, sometimes barely more than hints; others which carefully spell things out and try to explain every possible point of confusion. The latter might be likelier to be accepted by the OP, but the former are likelier to be upvoted by MSE users, perceiving them to be more elegant.
– user156970
Jun 9 '15 at 21:49

That's exactly what the acceptance mark is meant to indicate.

Alternatively I thought, maybe the additional votes on the other answer are to "make up" for the missing 'accepted' tag.

That might be, or not. You can't know that, and you shouldn't really care.

Any guidance on this would be appreciated.

Do what you did, accept the answer that you found most helpful to you. You can upvote all useful answers you get, and for a reasonable threshold, you should upvote all sufficiently useful answers you get, but if you mark an answer as accepted, the intention is to indicate which answer you found most helpful.

You can, at any time, change which answer you accepted, in case a new answer is posted you find even more helpful, or you just reconsidered and in the long run found another answer more helpful than the initially selected one.

I did. Voted it up, said thanks in comment, and gave a short reason why I accepted the other answer.

That's very considerate of you. Nobody can reasonably expect more.

• Makes sense, phrased like that. Will "move on" as suggested by Gerry above, no good reason to dwell on it I suppose. Jun 9 '15 at 12:49
You described the other answer as more "concise." But concise is not always better. Like if you ask for the definition of the Möbius function and I answer $\delta_{\omega(n)}^{\Omega(n)} (-1)^{\Omega(n)}$.