I've noticed that there are only a few questions that are marked as answered in GIS SE.
Can we announce something on the main website? My guess is NOT. But how to warn users that they can mark questions as answered? I know that the core of the website already tells you that..but it doesn't seem enough?
I don't think we need to change anything at this time.
I tend to hold out on accepting an answer for awhile to give time for more ideas to come forth. On re-visits the little % accepted indicator under my name reminds me to go have a look and see if I can bump up that "score" a little.
If we see someone with a lot of questions and no accepts we can drop a small comment to encourage them to do so.
Besides, is it really so bad if there isn't an "accepted" answer in the eyes of the questioner? It's pretty clear what answers the community think are most correct, and often they're better than the accepted answer anwyay.
This site is still young. We don't want to discourage hard questions from being asked.
Maybe later if this is still an issue, we could start shunning. Shunning plays an important role across all traditional societies: the loud mouth sitting around the campfire asking questions - but listening to no answers - would eventually be shunned.
For questions that have an upvoted answer that are older some specified time could be presented with an option to "shun this questioner". Users exceeding the shun vote limit would be blocked from asking new questions until they accept an answer, which would clear all shun votes accumulated for that question.
We could Also have an Option presented to the Questioner (after x days), on why he or she hasn't marked a Question as Answered. Possible options could be:
There seems to be an in-ordinate number of answers
that I would probably select (if it were my question) remaining unselected.
It is hard to know if this is because of laziness,
dis-interest, or the answer is not the perfect one (or one you want).
I have had the third condition on at least one question.
Can we convert this to a community wiki (or merge with another
and brainstorm ideas (nice ones) on how to encourage answer selection?
I find myself as an everday user losing interst in answering
questions for users I know will never select ANY answer.
It is easy enough to downvote a bad answer...
Why can't we have built in incentives (or dis-incentives
[repercussions]) for leaving questions hanging on the vine?
Perhaps a phased acceptance? ...
testing, partial acceptance, etc. maybe badges for acceptance?
Perhaps Admins could periodically check through unanswered Qs that are older than X days and either close them or from looking through the answers/responses from author, decide on who has answered it? (could be subjective).
At the moment I have two questions that I think I have answered (user has said, thanks - this has answered my Q) but have not got the credit for answering the Q.
Both Qs are the same user = Can we alert this user with some automated reply? How do the other StackExchange sites do it?
here & here
