When to accept an answer for someone

TMW has now given many of us the power to accept answers for other people, but haven't provided any guidance as to when we should we do it (other than that we have to wait for 7 days). As uncle Ben said "with great power comes great responsibility." Should we be accepting our own answers? Maybe we should add a vote to accept "policy"?

[DGM]

I was just browsing the help page and noticed that said privilege was listed.

While I had my own concerns about the propriety of the perk, I don't think I've ever seen a means to use it. I do quite a bit of dredging through old questions and I haven't seen an "accept this answer" button or anything.

So is this even a thing anymore, or does the help page just need to be updated?

[Stephen23]

@DGM: screenshot I made just now on this thread:

Do you see the button too? It is possible that the clue is in the "7 days of inactivity from the author", which does not state that the activity must on that thread specifically, so it could be activity anywhere on the entire website.

[DGM]

The ambiguity regarding what counted as "inactivity" did cross my mind, but in the case of your example, no I don't see any button. I'd say the majority of things I encounter when I'm poking through old stuff were posted by single-use accounts that have been inactive for years, so those should count as inactive either way.

To avoid any question that the age of the answer is a factor, I just hit 'browse' and rustled up a long-answered question from an inactive user.

This is in Firefox with no script blocking tools running. I'm just going to assume something is messed up. I can exercise other higher-tier privileges just fine.

[Stephen23]

@DGM: seems like a bug, or that perhaps the documentation does not fully explain what is going on:

You could write an email to TMW with a link to this thread.

[Star Strider]

This could be a Firefox cache problem. See if How to clear the Firefox cache solves it.

[DGM]

It's not a cache problem, though I can't be sure it isn't some other browser issue. I have to routinely clear cache as the scripts on this site often end up breaking in ways that require cache clearing just to get pages to load.

It doesn't work in Firefox, Firefox-derived browsers, or the version of Chrome that I have (which is admittedly old-ish).

I'm leaning toward "bug", though I'm not really sure how I feel about accepting answers for other other people anyway.

[Star Strider]

‘I'm not really sure how I feel about accepting answers for other other people anyway.’

I do only if I come across one in which the OP says something on the order of ‘Thanks! That’s exactly what I needed’ or some such, and has been at least a while in the past.

Unfortunately, Answers has more than its share of OPs who are either ingrates or who don’t understand the forum (and who are unlikely to finish their degrees anyway for analogous reasons). That’s no reason to deprive those who earned them of deserved Reputation points. (Personal rant, based on several years of anger and frustration in that regard.)

.

[DGM]

Well, when I'm browsing old stuff, my motive isn't so much to do things for the benefit of the inactive OP. I'm just inclined to make the forum easier for people using web/site searches. I suppose I'd have to weigh it like I do other activity on old posts. If it's a sufficiently clear and concrete question and the page is still getting a decent amount of monthly traffic, then maybe it's worth considering what maintenance is warranted.

There are plenty of good answers that are informally accepted as you describe. The problem is when a user posts a tentative answer to an ambiguous question and the OP accepts it. Now you have a good answer to an unclear problem. I doubt that helps anyone who reads it after the fact, so I wouldn't ever want to do anything to improve its attractiveness in searches.

Answer 1

[Thomas]

How about

Do not accept your own answer

unless

1. The author has thanked you replied that the problem has been solved but the author has not accepted your answer 'and' you have multiple up votes 'and'

2. yours is the only answer received

In case of multiple answers received please let one of the other (hopefully unbiased) editors accept the answer, probably based on the number of 'up votes'

[Wayne King]

I think those are reasonable guidelines. Especially #1 - Often you'll see the original poster say something like "Great, that worked!" and yet they do not accept the answer. I think in those cases, it's perfectly reasonable to accept your own answer.

[Jan]

Accepting answers for other authors would be less critical, if the the un-accepting is possible.

Additional limitation: Give the author one week to accept an answer.

[Daniel Shub]

@Jan there is a 7 day wait period.

[Matt J]

3. You are answering your own question ?

[Walter Roberson]

For several years it has not been allowed to accept your own answer, no matter how long since the last action.

(We had some problems along the way.)

Answer 2

[Daniel Shub]

I disagree with Thomas. I think we should never accept our own answers. I also think we should be vigilant about accepting answers for other people. If we accept answers for each other, then their will not be too many cases where you feel like you need to accept your own answer.

Edit

I think that you should flag questions/answers that you think should be accepted and then get a confirmation from someone else.

[Jan]

Good point, Daniel. I remember some bad emotions about users, who tought that the author has chosen the "wrong" answer. This would be more critical, if the "wrong" answer has been created by the accepting person itself. While I'm a frequent voter, I will accept good answers of others, but never my own ones, as it is impossible to vote the own answers also.

[Honglei Chen]

I second Daniel's suggestion. I think one should never be allowed to accept his/her own answer.

[James Tursa]

I agree with Daniel et al. The system should not allow one to either vote for or accept one's own answer. To allow this practice is to invite abuse. Yes, there are cases where the answer is clearly correct and complete but the answer was not accepted and did not generate acceptance points for the contributor. Sometimes you spend a lot of time crafting a detailed response, only to get a simple "thanks!" and nothing else (and sometimes not even that). Fine. I would rather have that situation than the situation where an abuser is pumping up his/her own reputation points by voting for and/or accepting his/her own answers. It is a disservice to the community to allow this practice.

[Walter Roberson]

If I recall correctly, you do not get reputation points for accepting your own answer. However, your stats in the Contributors page do go up.

[James Tursa]

IMO, you should not be able to pump up anything related to your own points or stats by voting for or accepting your own answers. Even if you don't get the points, there is still an incentive for abuse by skewing the answers accepted stats.

Answer 3

[Walter Roberson]

Out of all of the changes, this is the one that gives me the greatest pause. My first reaction is that such a facility should seldom be used, and that it should be one of the high-reputation privs rather than just about the first non-trivial priv.

I tend to think of it as being very much a "janitor" function, for use by the few that go around spending time just cleaning up. I do that, but I don't think many others do.

I think the problem being addressed is that approximately 60% of all Questions get Answered by never get Accepted. That is a quite large number, and honestly there is no way I have time by myself to Accept all those, so perhaps it does need to be something that a fair number of people can do. But still I am concerned.

I see a lot of Questions that dry out rather than getting definitively solved. People posting (good) requests for clarification and not getting any response. Now there are certainly cases where an Answer is good enough for the expressed Question, but in my experience a large number of Questions are muddled, and that even when Questions seem to be well expressed that there is very often some ambiguity in the details (though it might take someone familiar with that field to spot it.) The questions that have enough information to answer completely are usually ones that can be answered by reference to a specific FAQ section.

I suspect 500 reputation is too low to establish a history of dealing well with the kind of ambiguity that is present in those many questions.

A few days ago I was musing about this situation a bit, and I was thinking that perhaps the most appropriate would be an "expired" or "inactive" status. I would have to think more about what properties such a status would have. Not usually auto-delete, as sometimes some good discussion gets generated before the matter gets put aside.

[Wendy Fullam]

I'm part of the internal team for Answers at MathWorks. I'd encourage the acceptance of each others' answers, after 7 days, to add value to the question and answer set for future visitors.

A primary benefit of the "Accept" feature is to provide an indication of value to future site visitors who have the same (or similar) question. Answers receives upwards of 14,000 visitors every day. When these visitors find a question without an "accepted" answer, their perception may be that no value can be extracted. This may lead to them asking a similar, possibly duplicate question - which might waste the time of major contributors. For this reason, accepting each others' Answers could, in effect, save you time. It also adds a large indication of quality to our Answer database.

We are exploring other methods to encourage the OP to accept an Answer. (Expanded notifications may potentially help here.) Conversely, contributors with high reputation have proven their ability to provide quality content - which is why we also believe they can recognize quality content, in the absence of the participation of the OP.

This is why I say, go ahead! Accept each others' answers if you think they were the best Answer provided. The 7 day delay was established because, at that point, the chance of the OP returning is fairly low. You'll be adding additional value to the Answers world, and helping to grow each others' reputation score.

Answer 4

[Jan]

I suggest to disable self-accepting completely.

One exception: In own questions, accepting own answers is useful, when the OP has found a solution or if the question is thought as a tutorial or FAQ.

It is enough, when the contributors with > 2000 or > 3000 points can accept the answers of others. This will might be a drawback in rare situations, but it can get a severe problem, if one or more users start a massive self-accepting. Seeing the green check mark on an answer has a great attraction. The more time and energy has been spent to write an answer, the more frustrating is the impression to be ignored. In general all answers are given with the opinion, that they are good enough for beeing accepted. But authors of answers are not necessarily unbiased enough to decide this. Currently 94 members have the power to use this feature and in the past they have done this with greate care. But this need not be case in the future, and this would destroy the accepted status as strong indicator for an answer, which is good and solve the asked question.

[Walter Roberson]

"In general all answers are given with the opinion, that they are good enough for being accepted."

Only generally. ;-)

I sometimes write Answers that further explore topics, adding to the knowledge but not attempting to be the solution to the particular problem at hand.

I also sometimes write Answers along the lines of "That was not a good question", without giving a solution to the issue.

I may have something useful to say that is too long or significant to be just a "comment", but I do not expect to be Accepted in either situation.

[Jan]

@Walter: :-) Touché. The "in general" sentence was a weak workaround, after I did not find a matching translation in 5 minutes. This term was the knot in my tongue. I think, there are severe problems in the forum currently, but I do not want to pillory somebody, who does not participate in the discussion. Babbling, I know.

Sometimes I add answers also, when there is an accepted answer already and my solution is slower. Then readers do not have to test this by their own again.

[James Tursa]

@Jan: I agree.

Answer 5

[Kye Taylor]

Such functionality should not have been implemented, IMO.

Answer 6

[Matt J]

Maybe we should add a vote to accept "policy"?

This is the solution that I would advocate. Let the answer be accepted if/when it receives a sufficient number of upvotes (which as usual cannot be given by the person supplying the answer).

Personally, I think that the answer acceptance system as a whole is expandable, and that the ranking of any answer in a thread should be determined entirely by upvotes. The value of an answer marked as accepted is an illusion. Nobody ever knows definitively if an answer is right except maybe for the simplest of "how to" questions. It's not uncommon for an OP to select a less than best answer.

[Walter Roberson]

"Nobody ever knows definitively if an answer is right except maybe for the simplest of "how to" questions."

I don't think that is really correct.

A) The person who asked the question might well know for sure the Answer is right, because the Answer enlightened them about a conceptual difficulty they were facing, and the Answer explained matters in a way that allows them to see that it agrees with the documentation once you read the documentation with the right mental framework

B) There are plenty of factual questions which can be answered definitively in the form expressed. "Does MATLAB have a substring() function?" "Yes, it is hidden over here but you probably shouldn't use it." The question beyond that of "Exactly what do I need to type to fix my code that I haven't shown you?" might not get answered but what was asked might be.

[Matt J]

Hi Walter,

Maybe I should have said it differently: "it is often the case that the value of the answer is subjective."

My larger point is, there is no reason an answer should be given a high value - and the thread considered closed - purely because it gave the OP a sense of satisfaction. That's all that acceptance marking does.

On the other hand, if lots of people like the answer, as reflected by upvotes, then there is a statistical basis for viewing the answer as trustworthy. Majority rule isn't an infallible system, of course, but going by the whims of a single person (the OP) is surely more fallible.

Naturally, the OP gets to vote, too, but I don't see why the OP's vote should carry more weight. We always say that the benefit of threads in the forum is supposed to be for posterity, as well as for the OP.

[Walter Roberson]

"My larger point is, there is no reason an answer should be given a high value - and the thread considered closed - purely because it gave the OP a sense of satisfaction."

I do not agree.

People come here, and they ask questions, and they get responses. At some point, the person who asked the question either wanders off leaving it unresolved, or the person says "Yup, that's good enough for me, I'm done here, I'm not looking for anything more on this." The person who asked the question is the one who knows if they are expecting / hoping for more; when they are not, then they should have the facility to mark "So long, and thanks for all the fish".

The people who ask questions are typically doing so transactionally: they have something specific to solve, and once it is solved they move on.

This does not mean that there are no better solutions than the ones already given, or no better explanations, or no good questions about matters that should have been taken into account. It might mean that the person who asked the Question has Stopped Listening, though certainly not always.

Now, from the perspective of a resource to search for good solutions and best practices, the matter does not necessarily end there. People continue to drop in and vote or contribute, people continue to discuss, and as better alternatives come along (possibly involving features or tools that were not present at the original time), people continue to update. Curation takes place. And it is from that perspective that it starts to matter that a less good solution is marked prominently as "the" solution.

When we start to think in terms of curation of good solutions to problems, then we need to ask whether the existing tools and structure are suitable for that purpose. I do not think they really are.

For example, having more than 170 different Questions about DCT lsb steganography is frustrating and confusing. From the curation point of view, it would be better if a lot of those were lumped together, with probably a lot of redundancy thrown out. Wavelet lsb steganography might perhaps be different enough from DCT lsb steganography that the two should not be entirely merged.

When it comes to curation time, it would not be uncommon for most parts to be discarded (or at least relegated to end-notes.) 82 different versions of programs in which the user used "sum" as a variable and then tried to call "sum" as a function are only "useful" from the perspective of convincing people that Yes, this is something to take seriously.

At the moment, there is no deliberate project of having anyone experienced in a topic put together a "Topics In / Best Practices For / Common Problems For / FAQ" kind of post that might be the one that people should be more referred to. The MATLAB FAQ that does exist lives outside the Answers system.

How we should best curate is a good question, but it is not the same question as how to deal with the many many transactional posts -- the answers to which provide source material that could be drawn upon.

Perhaps an "I'm done here!" status should be more clearly separated from the "This is the solution" status.

[Matt J]

Perhaps an "I'm done here!" status should be more clearly separated from the "This is the solution" status.

I'd be fine with an "I'm done here" status, for the OP to let people know that her needs were covered. But I don't think it's a status that needs to award more rep points than an upvote or bump the answer permanently to the top of the thread. The discussion can be ongoing with everyone's evaluation of the answer counting equally.

An "I'm done here" status would also negate the original question in this thread about whether other people should be able to accept an answer in the OP's place. If the whole purpose of Accepting answers is for the OP to signify that they got what they came for, then other people doing so on their behalf would serve no purpose, and should be done away with completely.

[Walter Roberson]

I wonder though, whether it would make sense for a vote from the original poster to be worth more within the one Question, even if several Answers are voted for? The idea being that the person who asked the Question should be well placed to recognize what really helped them.

I worry about the wording: another way of phrasing "I'm done here!" is "The question can be closed" -- but Closed is what we use when we punt the question out of view saying "If you do not improve this question / make it relevant to the facility, then it will be deleted"

I also worry about the flow. If Voting and "I'm done" are too well separated, then people who ask Questions might not realize that saying "I'm done" does not reward the people who took the time to contribute. That would leave reputation increases up to the people who do know enough to take the extra step, together with whomever happens to wander by to vote. As there are times of year when we get over 200 new Questions per day, the resources of volunteers to go and deliberately check out topics to vote for Answers can be stretched too thin.

It is really helpful to my stress levels to be able to glance at the capsule information for a topic, see that one of the regular contributors has Answered, and then for me to just ignore it, knowing that the regular will do a decent job on it and be appropriately rewarded with an Accept. Having to go in and read 100+ Questions per day and assess Answers and Vote because otherwise the contributor won't get any acknowledgement... well, unfortunately, that is really wearing.

From time to time I do marathon days, answering and commenting until I burn out or fall asleep at my desk. Those come out as about 16 to 18 hours (with perhaps 1/2 hour for eating.) On those days I "touch" (contribute to somehow) at most 75 Questions, excluding ones I just reformat. And I sleep badly afterward and might be somewhat foggy the next day, from information overload. I find that once we hit more than about 75 Questions per day, that I can't read them and process them all -- not if I am going to do more than just look at the question and say "Yup, you've got a problem all right."

[Matt J]

I wonder though, whether it would make sense for a vote from the original poster to be worth more within the one Question, even if several Answers are voted for? The idea being that the person who asked the Question should be well placed to recognize what really helped them.

I question whether that's true. For example, we see many homework posts in the forum where some answerers give very good hints while others spoonfeed the entire solution to the OP. The OP will tend to reward the latter, but in IMHO it is the former who gave the best help.

I also worry about the flow. If Voting and "I'm done" are too well separated, then people who ask Questions might not realize that saying "I'm done" does not reward the people who took the time to contribute.

A fair point, but there are solutions. For example, you could make it so that "I'm done" automatically triggers an upvote, with all the same effects as if the OP upvoted directly. As one of these effects, the OP could not give additional upvotes to the answer after doing this.

[Walter Roberson]

"you could make it so that "I'm done" automatically triggers an upvote"

An upvote of what? All of the Answers posted at that time? Some of them might not be any good.

If the "I'm done" is attached to a specific Answer then what you propose becomes like the current Accept except that it does not move the selected answer to the top and (under your proposal) the poster would be barred from voting for other Answers later, which they currently are not.

I was thinking perhaps something more like the system noticing they haven't voted for anything in the question and asking them whether they are sure.

"The OP will tend to reward the latter, but in IMHO it is the former who gave the best help."

That does happen now to some extent. On the other hand, not everyone is doing homework, and not everyone who does homework is just looking for a fast solution.

For example when I posted a regexp question, I was the person in the best position to know which Answer(s) best explained the situation to me. No-one outside of me could know which Answer really twigged my understanding in the best way.

When I am Answering a Question and I use my Magic 8-Ball Rays to figure out what the poster is really stuck on and answer that, then my Answer is not necessarily the best Answer to what the Question looks like it is about, but it might be what the person needed.

[Matt J]

If the "I'm done" is attached to a specific Answer then what you propose becomes like the current Accept except that it does not move the selected answer to the top and (under your proposal) the poster would be barred from voting for other Answers later, which they currently are not.

No, they wouldn't be barred from voting for other Answers, just from awarding the same Answer more than 2 points. In what I envision, an "I'm done" would be like an upvote in all respects except that it would also provide a visual flag on the Answer that the OP liked.

It is like the current system, except the OP's vote doesn't carry any more influence than anybody else's.

That does happen now to some extent. On the other hand, not everyone is doing homework, and not everyone who does homework is just looking for a fast solution.

There will always be a distribution of cases, but I don't think those people really suffer under what I propose. They still get to reward the Answer they liked and, with the "I'm done" flag, others in the forum would still know whether the OP's vote is up for grabs.

Answer 7

[Jan]

Another point: Users should not get the power to remove flags on their own questions or comments.