How can we encourage askers to select an answer for their question?
Having answered questions is key to a successful beta - but if the askers aren't selecting from the available answers, it won't work.
Any thoughts?
How can we encourage askers to select an answer for their question?
Having answered questions is key to a successful beta - but if the askers aren't selecting from the available answers, it won't work.
Any thoughts?
The system already prompts the user to accept answers when warranted, so please do not continue to add additional notices to your posts or add comments prodding users to accept answers.
While well intentioned, as these "gentle reminders" start to accumulate across the system, the whole thing starts to look somewhat harassing to new users — so I would ask you not to do that. Accepting an answer is a completely voluntary activity, and it is up to the user to decide when (and if) an answer should be accepted at all.
The "accepted answer" function has nothing to do with whether an post is considered "answered" or not. From the system's point of view, a question comes off the 'unanswered' list when it receives an answer with at least one up-vote. So asking the original author to 'accept' an answer (in terms of making this site "work") is both unnecessary and unwarranted.
There's also the unfortunately side effect that, if you are 'accepting' an answer too quickly, the questions/issues take on an appearance of being resolve and no further input is needed. Accepting an answer too quickly discourages new participation and discourages the addition better answers as new users find this site.
Besides, early in the beta, you have a relatively small community adding content. If a large percentage of questions are already answered, the chances are that your questions aren't terribly challenging, or more likely they have already been asked hundreds of times on every other site on this subject. Neither scenario makes for a very interesting site.
As mentioned, gently reminding the user in a comment to the question is a good start, after all comments on the question do notify the user in a variety of ways (based on their settings).
Beyond that it's difficult, but in this early ßeta stage we can probably be a bit more vocal as we are trying to get the site ready for launch and anyone here has already made a commitment.