# Tag Info

72

No, it's not OK to post 72 questions, get useful answers, and not accept any of them. I would hope some moderator would take this user aside and explain a few things about how this site works best.

52

No, it is not rude. As always, the "accepted answer" is a subjective judgment by the original question asker about which answer helped him the most. Changing the accepted answer from one to another just because you changed your mind (without having, say, a new answer posted) is also perfectly within your rights as the question asker. (And honestly, anyone ...

40

Of course not. But you can soften the blow by adding a comment explaining why you did it.

39

Various proposals around acceptances are floated on various metas all the time: allowing moderators to mark as accepted, allowing other users to mark as accepted, and now more or less forcing the users to accept answers. I honestly do not understand the obsession. So, there is no green checkmark next to any answer. How is that a significant problem? The ...

38

The Question part is for questions, and the Answers part is for answers. So if you have an answer to your question, add your own answer. If you think it is a complete answer (and the best answer given), then you can accept it.

32

If you unaccept an answer, the author of the answer will lose 15 reputation points. Additionally, you yourself will lose 2 reputation points. However, if you select a new answer, then the new author gains the 15 reputation and you gain back your 2 reputation. Note that if you accept an answer which you yourself have written, there is no reputation gain. ...

30

Take as long as you want or need. It's good to remember what the actual purpose of upvotes and accepts are. An upvote is much more than simply a "thank you" or a way of giving imaginary internet points to other users. An upvote is an indication to all other users that this answer is good and helpful. When other users happen across questions, they are led to ...

29

A couple of things to answer your question: 1) Good hints belong here. Bad hints do not. If you want to make a good contribution to the site as an answerer, do the problem out always. It does not matter whether you plan to post a full, novella-like solution that details every step as far as $1+1=2$ or just enough to give a taste of the path one needs to ...

27

Also when writing a comment it explicitly states to avoid comments like "thanks" or so. Based on what I've seen, it's more a warning because some popular questions would net hundreds of such comments from others viewing them. I feel like that rule is more lax in terms of the asker saying it to someone else; I know I've done it a few times. I guess the only ...

26

I'd say the main arguments for accepting answers are given in the FAQ posts in meta.SO on accepting an answer and accept rate, namely: rewards posters for solving your problem informs others that your issue is resolved indicates which answer you think is the most most helpful to you

26

I accepted the answer that was the most helpful to me 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 ...

23

Here's a detailed explanation. In a nutshell, there's a grey checkmark on the left under the two vertical arrows and the vote count. Simply click the one of the answer you want to mark as the accepted answer: You can try here to see if it works :)

23

Admittedly, there are times when changing the accepted answer may annoy someone. Here are some circumstances: When the question is a homework question, the accepted answer is a well written hint and the newer answer is a full solution. Some may think that by accepting the full solution, you are encouraging the practice of doing homeworks for the others on ...

22

What I have done is to submit my own answer with a comment at the beginning stating my belief that the accepted answer was incorrect. Is there anything else that I can or should do? Both of what you did are entirely within the spirit of how this site operates. The only additional thing that I can think of would be to downvote the incorrect answer.

21

To add to Willie Wong's answer, let me point out that it is probably good practice for most question not to accept an answer "after some minutes", but rather to let the question stand for a while, even if you get an answer that satisfies you. There are several reasons for this; one is the one you observed: you may get a better answer. Another is that having ...

21

I can think of a few valid reasons for moderator intervention regarding accepted answer: One user accepts another user's junk answers as a way of gaming the reputation system The answer owner requests deletion, having realized that the answer is totally wrong and being unable to get it unaccepted by the question owner (discussed in http://meta.math....

21

It's entirely up to you how you choose which answer to reward with a green checkmark; you don't have to explain or defend your reasoning to anyone. But please do choose something if you consider your problem solved due to the answers. If everything else fails, throw dice. In the great scheme of things, who gets the 15 meaningless internet points is not as ...

21

I would go with the answer that was more helpful to me to understand the subject of my question. How do you even know that the other answer was "technically more correct"? Would you have arrived at that conclusion without the answer you found more helpful?

21

My own feeling is that a post that allows you to finish the problem yourself is the very best that can happen. I get disappointed when it becomes clear that the OP (the person asking) is not willing to follow my hints on how to finish. As the saying goes: Give a man a fire and he's warm for one night. Set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life. ...

20

Here is a partial answer to your question. More of a general comment about hints belonging to the comments or not. Hints should sometimes go to the comments, and sometimes to the answers. First of all, hints are useful to future visitors, since they might be standing at the same shoes (or isomorphic shoes) as the person who asked the question. And ...

19

It is okay to not accept any answers if they haven't really clarified what you were trying to solve. You're under no obligation to give people participation points. If the answers lead you to understanding the problem, you should always accept. In this particular case I think the fact that they have asked 72 questions implies they have gotten useful answers ...

19

If OP gets a very brief if not incomplete answer, and then adds their own answer which is a more complete version, who should be marked as Answering the Question. Whichever answer the OP finds most useful. Most design and functionality aspects of this site serve a purpose. Many serve to make the process of asking and answering as easy and painless as ...

19

Accepting an answer is the decision of the asker alone. Apply criteria that you find reasonable. It sometimes can make sense to communicate your decision in a comment. Also, you can still up-vote all answers you find useful. One sees comments of the following form with some frequency on non-accepted answers: The alternative approach presented in this ...

18

I'm not convinced that there's a problem to solve here, and the proposed solution has the potential to lower the utility of the site for everyone. Yes, sometimes an asker accepts an answer without taking time to think it through, but where's the real harm in that? There's an answerer who will get 15 perhaps undeserved rep points, but really, so what? It's ...

18

It is a good feature to have because it gives the answerer incentive to attempt to help the asker, rather than just give an answer that the rest of the community thought was interesting. Basically, it gives the asker an extra layer of "authority" over the quality of answers to his or her question. Personally, I share your sentiment that the feature just ...

18

Because this is a case of progressive insight resulting in a substantially refined question (an algorithm isn't very sensible if no such number exists), I would consider a follow-up question a better approach in this case. Also because the original question is still interesting with the follow-up in place.

17

There is no universally accepted rule for this. In fact, I argue that there shouldn't be: if the "accepted answer" were to based on some sort of popular consensus on what is "best" (best can be most complete, soonest, etc.) then it wouldn't be up to you as a user to accept an answer. It would be up to the community to vote for one. One of the main design ...

17

If you would like to do a great service to later visitors, then you can write a complete union answer so that there is truly a single, great answer. Or at least an answer indicating for later viewers a complete resolution, and explaining how the other two answers fit into this. This way, a later visitor who is intrigued by (or perhaps even has the problem ...

16

In my opinion, if the user specifically comments on your answer being very helpful, or the greatest, I think it is lovely to ask the user to accept your answer if they find it the most helpful. Keep in mind the accept rate: There might be a reason that the answer has not been accepted if you see a high accept rate. If you see a low accept rate, browse a ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible