4

I know we are still pretty early in beta, but how long should one wait for potentially additional answers before accepting one as the best answer? Several of my questions have only one answer, and while it's a good answer, there's certainly more room for insight or perhaps better answers. Would accepting early hinder others from choosing to tackle a different slant to answering the same question? Where is the balance between discouraging people from answering your questions because of a low-accept rate, and not accepting answers to encourage futher discussion?

And then on the flip-side, I had one question with two absolutely fabulous non-overlapping answers. They're both great answers, but I can't accept both as "accepted" so is there any precedent on how to choose which one to accept?

Choosing which answers to accept and when seems less clear-cut than on some of the programming SE sites.

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

In general, my advice is "pick the one that you want as soon as you want."

If you feel like a question has been fully answered by a given answer, choose that as accepted. If you feel like the topic has a lot more to depth to it and you want to wait until more answers come in, feel free to not accept an answer.

Also, if you feel the question is not getting the attention that it desires and you're looking for a more complete answer, you can post a bounty on the question. Posting a bounty gives you different reasons for the bounty, including the desire to have a canonical answer or to draw attention to the question.

Ultimately, the little green checkbox merely means that you find the answer useful. It doesn't necessarily confer "rightness" to the answer, merely usefulness. So, please don't feel any pressure to wait for the "right" answer. On the other hand, don't feel pressured to choose one that you feel doesn't answer your question.

Just pick the one you want, as soon as you want to.

2
  • 1
    On that note (and perhaps this is a separate question in its own right) - do acceptance rates matter? Either individually or site-wide?
    – Waggers
    Oct 17, 2011 at 14:12
  • @waggers Yes and no. A high acceptance rates simply encourages others to answer your questions since they know that they might gain that +15 rep from answering the question. A low acceptance rate tends to indicate that the person is just asking the questions and not really following up. It kind of gives a bad impression of the user. Having said that, there are many times that questions should be left unanswered since there's no answer that the asker found useful. So, yes, they matter to an extent. But they only go so far.
    – Richard
    Oct 17, 2011 at 14:15

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .