How do we encourage answers to be accepted

Question

Currently almost 35% of the available questions, do not have an accepted answer. When looking over these, I think this number should be higher, certainly when I see the number of upvotes for some of those answers (and I'm not just talking about two of my answers which have more than 10 upvotes and didn't get accepted ;o).

So how do we encourage our inquisitors to accept one of the given answer (provided it is the answer to their question)?

Answer 1

Point new users in the right direction and give others a gentle nudge

As pointed out by others, new users may not be aware of the process. Others may have forgotten to accept an answer.

If there are good upvoted answers, I think it is good to point new users in the right direction with a comment under the question such as "Welcome to the Tridion SE Q&A site! If one of the answers below helped fix your issue, consider accepting it (click the check mark next to that answer). You will get +2 reputation. And it gives the person that helped you credit for their effort. More importantly, it will help others searching for a solution to this issue for a long time. See here for more on this."

For not so new users, a gentle nudge with an abbreviated comment may suffice.

Answer 2

One important thing to note is that - due to the nature of Tridion development - questions on this StackExchange site are likely to be (in general) broader in scope than questions on another StackExchange sites, such as StackOverflow. We are likely to see many more questions of the form, "How to I accomplish x," and comparatively fewer of the form, "Why doesn't y work?"

This has a couple of effects. Firstly, there's likely to be a longer period of time between an answer being posted and accepted, because the development work between the two events is greater. So, perhaps it's just a matter of patience.

Secondly, because questions are broader in scope, you're likely to see a wider variety of answers. This means you're also likely to see some very high-quality, detailed and "well-voted" questions going unaccepted. In my opinion, however, this is no bad thing. The fact that an answer didn't provide the eventually-implemented solution to the initial problem does not mean that it is without merit, nor does it mean that the answer didn't help to isolate a solution, nor does it mean that it won't be helpful to others in future. All of this leads to us having a varied wealth of information posted under every question, which creates an excellent resource.

Perhaps the issue, then, is trying to encourage people whose problems weren't quite solved by one of the provided answers to come back and post their eventual solution.

Answer 3

Regarding accepting the answer, I see three types of persons are there in all forums:-

1. User want's to test whether provided answer is working as expected or solving some part of the problem
2. User has forgetten to accept the answer
3. User is not interested in accepting the answers

Better we can remind the user saying that

If the provided answer is solving your issue, please accept it by clicking tick mark on left hand side of the answer.

Answer 4

This can be mildly frustrating mostly because the questions still show up in the default view of the unanswered questions queue (although I would say for our site where we have upvotes for most answers this is not the case.) I've seen several cases (and had it happen to me a couple of times) on Stack Overflow where the OP has gone as far as leaving a comment on an answer saying something on the lines of 'Thanks, that worked really well.' but not upvoting the answer or accepting the question.

I would add onto Siva's answer that there are three additional cases where I see an OP not accepting answers:

1. The answer, despite upvotes, doesn't actually answer the question for them. In this case I would hope the OP provides comments asking for more clarification or stating any issues with the answer.
2. The OP is waiting to see if more, perhaps better answers come in. In this case I would hope the OP only waits a couple days at the most.
3. The OP isn't really aware of the protocol for using SE and doesn't actually know they are supposed to accept the answer or how to accept the answer.

In all three cases (plus the three he outlined) I would think Siva's suggested message left as a comment would be a good prod to get people to accept answers.