Answers unaccepted

[Alessandro Lombardo]

Sometimes is very difficult to get your answer accepted although you give a good solution. Do you think that should be implemented a feature that let the reporter accept the answer more easier and maybe check that the report accept that?

[Arkadiusz Terpiłowski]

Fully agree. Sometimes, it's even hard to send a comment because the ANTI-SPAM filter prevents so many words. I understand that Atlassian is trying its best to eliminate spammers, non-relevant topics, etc., but something is definitely wrong with those filters.

[Dan Breyen]

I agree with the Spam filter.  If it happens, it would certainly help if people got notified if it happens.  It seems strange that active community members would get trapped by the spam filter.

[Craig Nodwell]

Personally I just move on.  There are times though I would like the feedback of knowing it was a correct solution, but then again "There's always more"

[Ronald Hipol]

+1

[Stuart Capel - London]

It's possible but there's a balance to be struck, and allowing everyone to mark their own answer as accepted could lead to less comprehensive and helpful answers being marked as complete. Even if I think I've given a correct answer, I don't want the answer accepted unless the OP is happy with it.

There are automatic emails that are sent to the OP suggesting they mark it as answered if it helped them. Unfortunately not everyone will do this but many do.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm not sure how it could be made easier to accept an answer.  How would you improve on "click the green button next to the answer"?

The community does send an email reminder to accept an answer after a while, but a lot of people don't bother to re-engage.

I'd love it to be more engaging, so people do come back!

(The cynic in me wants to point out that there is a pattern to the non-responders - they tend to be the people who have asked a basic question here because they have been asked to do something and ask us to guide them because they don't want to tell their customer that they don't really know anything about Atlassian stuff and can't be bothered to read the docs or search for themselves)

As a community leader, I can mark answers as correct, including my own, but I only do it when 

• The poster comments that an answer helped them (some people simply don't seem to see the "mark answer right", but at least make an effort to respond)
• I've stumbled across a question that has a good answer and is a little bit old
• When I get asked to review answers by other community leaders.  We have a slack channel for "accept this answer"

For what it's worth, we have a slack channel for "accept this answer" because the gamification systems score a big fat zero for marking your own answers right, but you do get "points" if someone else marks your answer right.

I don't know if it scores differently - I'd like to see something like 0 points for marking your own right, 2 for a leader marking it right and 3 if it's the original questioner marking it right.

[Dan Breyen]

Maybe allow Community Leaders to Accept answers after a given period of time?  Plus that cleans out some of the older posts where answer was given.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Um, as I said, leaders can mark answers correct.

Whenever we feel like it, but most of us are well-behaved, we don't mark our own ones right, and we don't mark things right before giving the original poster a while to feed back or mark it themselves.

We have inherited a lot of old content too (I've got unaccepted answers here going back to 2012, and that's "the tip of the iceberg" - we didn't import the stuff from the decade before that!), and with the current volume of postings, we simply don't have the time to go back and curate the older stuff.  It's hard enough keeping on top of current questions,(especially the ones where we really should be more honest and reply with RTFM or LMGTFY - our leaders are stuck in a pattern of being nice and answering all those with real answers, albeit with a lot of copy and paste answers) spam filtering, tag de-duplication/slepping-corrections.

In an ideal world, we'd have enough time to go back and look at old posts, marking their answers right, so that people are less likely to necropost on them.

But the Community Advisory Board does have a pile of improvement suggestions that we're hoping to get set up in the new version of the platform (this incarnation of the Atlassian Online Community is the fifth platform its been hosted on, called Khoros, and we're going to move to the sixth soon, although the next one is a new version of Khoros, called Aurora, rather than a complete change of tech).

Some of the stuff we're discussing is preventing the spam caused by posting on older items, highlighting the age of questions and answers ("this was right in 2018, but you probably need to be reading more recent answers"), getting us more (better) curation tools and processes, blocking ChatGPT answers while also using it to reduce the number of LMGTFY/duplicate/RTFM postings, and and and....

[edwin vasquez]

I just hope they accept the answer that helped them so it can help someone else in the future. If they don't, I just move on.