I just marked a couple of my posts in two forums as answered by myself... and I become one of the top answerers for this forum (as well as bug reporting)? I'm not exactly sure that's a good thing.
In that way, new site visitors could become the next top answerer.
What do you think about this? Take a chance. Prepare to be surprised.
Edited byOliver BlackFriday, August 1, 2008 8:37 PMMore
I think marking your own post as answer (when you are OP) should be a separate action from marking someone else's response as answer. No Green check, no contribution to the stats.
Maybe "Resolved" is what we need here, with some different symbol.
The more I think about it, the more I dislike this concept of "The Answer". Many questions do not have a single answer, either because the question was not properly posed (key information missing), or because the observed problem could in fact have more than one cause.
When someone searches the forums for a topic, IMHO they are not interested in whether the original questioner got the answer he/she was looking for; they want the answer for their problem, which might be different. A general discussion of the issue, with a variety of responses, might well be more useful than a thread in which the OP obtained "The Answer".
I know this isn't going to happen, but I think that "Resolved" and "Vote as Helpful" would be much more meaningful than insisting on identifying posts as "The Answer".
> I just marked a couple of my posts in two forums as answered by myself...and I become one of the top answerers for this forum
Must be an easy forum to moderate if 2 answers gets you to the top.
I solve this moral dilemna by never marking any of my posts. Especially in the old forums where points scores seemed to have a value this obviously meant I had a lower score but at least it was a genuine score.
I also dislike people who in their sigs have a line "mark my post as answer if it helps you" because they too are causing a non-level playing field.
All of us should rely on others to mark good posts without doing it ourselves or pushing anyone else into doing it (imo) !
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I think the suggestion in the other reply is a good one.
Marking your own post as an Answer should not count in the stats as an answer but should just serve as help for the thread itself. Then I would be out of that moral dilemna and could (occasionally!) mark my own posts ..... and help position the thread as one that didn't need an answer.
I've started adding "mark as answer if it helps" to my posts becuase I've learned that sometimes people don't realize the answer/vote as helpful buttons are even there. They just say "thanks" and go away.
I agree that the answer thing is messed up, but I'm not sure changing it to "resolved" is the right way to go about it... maybe try this:
Change "Mark as answer" it to "Mark as Solution," don't allow someone to mark their own post as a solution, remove propose as answer (as not a lot of people use it and it doesn't seem to matter to the OP that much), and change the vote thing to two buttons that are Helpful/Not Helpful.
Make sure the Not Helpful thing shows up in posts (it doesn't now, which is odd), and give a blue background for Helpful.
(Of course, add report as a link beneath the control bar, or something like that). Take a chance. Prepare to be surprised.
