# Tag Info

75

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.

54

(Note: this is my opinion as a user; my moderator hat is off.) I am in favor of ordering answers by number of votes only. The green check is supposed to indicate that the author of the question found a particular answer more useful than others. It has been my observation that many question authors here (a) lack the mathematical maturity to judge a "...

41

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

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 ...

30

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 ...

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 ...

26

I dislike this proposition, for one reason: For many questions, the highest voted answer is simply the oldest. This is especially true of questions that appear on the "Hot Network Questions" list. In such cases, often a really good answer will appear later and will never attain the same number of upvotes as earlier questions. The "accepted ...

25

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 ...

22

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 ...

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. ...

21

While I'm not the most active on this site, my experience on other SE sites would suggest a simple piece of advice: upvote answers that are helpful, and downvote answers that are harmful. You get a lot of latitude to decide what "helpful" (or "harmful") means, but an answer that points you in the right direction enough that you can find ...

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 ...

20

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 ...

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 ...

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.

18

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 ...

17

Regardless of the gratitude argument, accepting answers makes the sites questions easier to sift through. When there are questions that don't have accepted answers, people are more inclined to use their time to peruse the question and answers. If then they have wasted their time due to there being one or more perfectly acceptable answers, that is a loss to ...

16

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.

15

It depends. I've seen some occasions where a user posts a 'thank you, this helped' comment under my answer. If it's a user who is new to the site, and hasn't accepted any answers yet, I usually reply with something like: Since you're new to the site, I'd like to remind you that you can accept this answer if it helped you. But you can also wait until a ...

15

I think the best solution would be to allow users to choose between sorting strictly by the number of votes, and putting the accepted answer at the top. Right now, there are three ways of sorting the answers: active, oldest, and votes. I would like to add a fourth option that ignores whether an answer has been accepted or not. (What this option should be ...

13

You question/request was Please clarify if I'm doing a blunder somewhere. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. You should accept the answer that you best feel answers this question/request.

13

As a "complement" to @Daniel Fischer's answer: Screen shot coming from the tour.

12

They tend to just up vote the answer. Users cannot vote until they have 15 points (and are registered). There is a good chance that the vote you see came from someone other than the new user. But every user is able to accept answers to their question (unless they lost access to their account). If you think they are unaware of the feature, you can ...

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