Some questions are being answered quickly in on of the comments; in some cases, the OP even "accepts" (in words, in another comment) the comment-answer.  Here's an .  The problem is that such questions are stuck forever in the "Unanswered" section, as there's really no need to add a formal answer, and the OP is probably never going to look for new answers, and it is already informative as is for google-comers.  In any meaningful sense - this question is answered.  What can we do with such questions?  I've seen here and there ad-hoc requests such as "please phrase this as an answer so I could accept it"; but that's really specific (and quite annoying). Should we allow OPs to "accept" a comment as an answer (I know this was discussed , but that's a very old discussion), or should we allow moderators to flag old questions as answered if it's clear that an answer exists and the OP is ok with it? (this is similar to  offer, but is still different)  I know there have been many discussions touching the subject from various aspects, but this is a very specific offer: let moderators flag a question as answered when it has no answers, it has an "answer" in the comments, and it is clear the OP is "accepting" that answer. I have not seen that specific offer here.
22192
Sometimes I have asked a question which got no answers, but is answered in the comments to the question.  How should I handle these questions? I can't accept an answer, so it is never an accepted question.  For example this one:   (ok here the answer in the comments is from me, but nevertheless I also have others of them)
25110
There are lots of questions tagged  that don't have a  response.  How do we interpret this? Is it because they are declined by default? We just have to wait for a response (the team is very busy)? Is Jeff the only one that reviews this questions?  I suppose the ones that have negative votes may (or may not) be declined by default, but there are quite a few with some to a lot upvotes that should have an official answer.
108415
About a month ago, we rolled out a new feature: . So far, the reception has been mostly positive, and I've definitely seen    posted in this form. But I've also seen something else, a side-effect you may have seen discussed here on MSO:     Ignore for a moment the specific details of the Q&amp;A pairs discussed in those two posts, and note the following: three poorly-asked questions, questions that ordinarily would have been closed, down-voted, and/or edited... But instead sparked a small outrage among the members who came across them. Now, we've known for years that self-answered questions can be problematic. Asking is hard. Answering is hard. Asking a question when you already know the answer can be even harder to do well. But that is - or rather, that should be - beside the point: plenty of people ask really terrible questions without bothering to answer them, and we've certainly managed to handle them over the years. If normal community-moderation is failing when it comes to self-answered questions, that's a problem. These are edge-cases at the moment. But if we're trying to encourage more use of this form to share knowledge on Stack Exchange (), it's something that needs to be faced. I'm presenting one possible solution below (in true gratuitous self-answer fashion), but what do you think? Would some other option work better? Is this even a real problem?
45438
I have noticed it is not uncommon for new users to post short, sometime barely related, answers to questions that are more than a year old.    Obviously if it should be a comment, is spam, or is not related at all, it should be dealt with accordingly, but I'm more interested in getting feedback on answers that don't necessary address the question but might be related.  Had it been posted at the time the question was first asked, it would have received enough attention to be fixed or clarified at that time, but since it is on an old question, the OP may no longer be around and/or the question does not have enough attention anymore to have the community deal with it.  The best example I ran into today is .  So this question is barely related to the original question.  But I can make an argument that it might be helpful to someone in the future because it does suggest a potential solution to a similar problem.  However it doesn't address the OP's question, especially since the OP accepted an answer that is not related to this late answer.  What is the correct method for dealing with such a response:   Do we flag it as "not an answer" Should this be downvoted since it doesn't answer the OP's question, even though it might be technically accurate. Or is something like this perfectly acceptable as an answer?   To clarify, I'm trying to get some feedback/guidance on where is the line (or gray area) between "Not an Answer" and a bad (downvote worthy) answer.  How related (or unrelated) to the original question does it need to be before "Not an Answer" becomes a better option.
21448
When browsing on questions that I would like to answer or flag, I now ended up to a question that was put on hold. I had to open the question to realize it was not an eligible one and it was already put on hold. So nothing to do about, basically.  On software design one rule is to avoid clicks. If I look for questions to answer, I normally skip ones marked as green on list because these have an accepted answer already there. For put on hold questions the only indicator is maybe a flappy title, put for being sure there is no need to even flag the question, I would like to see a yellow color on status (votecount, answer count) box to tell the question is on hold. That way my moderating and answering double focus would immediatedly go for the next one. Desicion of open or not would be easier.  (You may discuss the color, light grey is ok, too.)
38945
A couple of days ago  for a problem I had.  I got no answers, but almost by chance I solved my problem.  I am not quite sure if the question and answer are really relevant given that the solution was so simple.  So I have a question on the question:   Should I answer it (moving current Update 2 as an answer) and in a couple of days accept my own answer, so that question and answer are part of the archive? Should I ask for an administrative closing of the question, so the question reminds in the archive but not as an answered question? Should I ask for deletion of the question, so the question is removed for the archive?
72457
As well all know there are a lot of questions which never get accepted answers.  Some might be justified as no one has answered them yet, or the OP doesn't feel that the question has been answered to their satisfaction. But I’m sure there are thousands of questions out there that can become accepted, and for some reason or another they haven’t been yet.  I have an idea to try and address this.  Now for questions in your profile that have not been accepted for a certain length of time we get a message asking us to consider placing a bounty on that question to help us get the right answer, which is fine.  As accepting answers gives 2 rep points to the user, would it be worth us also showing them ‘potential rep’ so that they know how much they could gain if they where to accept answers in all of their remaining questions.  As an example, someone could have asked 20 questions and only 10 of them have been accepted. They could get a message saying:  “Your unaccepted questions equates to an additional 20 rep points…”  Of course I wouldn’t want it to make people accept just for the hell of it, more to make them remember that they get rep for the accepted answers so it’s worth revisiting old questions to see if any can be accepted.  Thoughts?  Edit    Thanks for the comments so far.  Certainly I don’t want people accepting an answer just for the sake of rep. I suppose I'm just thinking of how we can get people to go over their unaccepted questions again, just in case they've forgotten about some of them, and maybe realise that one or two of them can now become accepted.  For example, if you have someone who’s asked a hell of a lot of questions and most have no accepted answer yet, surely there’s a chance that they might have forgotten about some of those questions.
78182
I ask a lot of question on SO, so this recommendation/idea comes from that experience. I'm not really sure how this would fit in with the current structure of SE.   Oftentimes after asking a question, maybe after an hour or so, I end up finding the answer I needed somewhere. And it comes time for me to answer the most difficult question of all: do I delete this question, or do I keep it in case someone answers and others may benefit from it. The problem is, if I don't delete it and no one answers, my acceptance rate goes down. So usually I'll just delete it.  However, sometimes I fear that someone is typing a really really long answer to my question since itäs only been an hour, and so I imagine the nightmare that person experiences when they find out their essay will be gone to waste. Overall, this never-to-be-seen-again answer could have benefitted many people had the question remained.  Since SE has gone "live-happy" lately, where answers and comments refresh live, I thought it might be interesting if the original asker of the question (or anyone else for that matter) could see how many people are currently responding to the question (just count, not necessary to display their names). This way, if I know someone is replying, I won't delete the question, and others can benefit from it.
23185
How should SO handle users who don't "maintain" their questions by selecting answers, or remarking newer/better answers as the chosen one?  Many questions...   Have no answer marked correct, even when one is plainly there Are not reviewed by the poster to select a new correct answer   I don't mind taking the time to answer questions, but don't see the point when I don't get "reputation" for doing so since no one reads those questions, and reputation seems to be the point of the site.  I think the "remind to accept an answer" feature is there now, since I just saw it when coming back.  I missed it the first time though.
74661
Often, I will go to answer a question, and I will notice that someone commented on the question, which basically the answer. Why not just answer instead of commenting? If the answer to the question is in the comments but provided as an answer, should I still provide an answer just for the sake of clarity?
38419
I have noticed that some questions get a lot of responses quickly, and the cool fact is that most of the time these initial responses are correct.  I see users are motivated to accept answers. Because many questions take less than 24h to get an acceptable response, I'm unsure what to do when I have a question that takes more than 24h to get a response that I feel is complete enough to warrant being marked as accepted.  And even for acceptable responses, I often hesitate to accept them out of concern that posters will pass my question by if it already has an accepted answer (unless it has lots of upvotes). Does this really deter the higher-quality posters, though?
83967
I was able to see , which has been flagged as not an answer, while going through the review tools. Is this supposed to be possible, or is this a glitch? If it's meant to be possible - what's the point of it? Surely being the OP I'm going to be biased and most likely wish to choose to disagree with the flags...    update:   I've been able to select "flag or disagree" and then say "I disagree"...   So, would there be some gaming involved here, if I was to agree with the flag, then delete my own answer (would I get a helpful flag for that), then undelete it (still leave my answer there)...?  However, as expected, it now appears to have disappeared from the queue as expected (or at least I assume it has, as it hasn't appeared in the 50 from multiple page reloads anyway...)  And here it is in flag history:
94406
See  for more details. In short, two comments have been probably deleted after a single user flagged them as obsolete because they contained accept or accepting in a sentence.  I found out that, as moderator, I cannot undelete those comments for which the deletion threshold is lowered to 1 flag.    Since on Drupal Answers users could ask a question about a module for accepting answers, the word accept could be contained in a comment, even though the comment is not saying anything about the user not accepting answers given to his questions. For example, the comment could be "What is your module supposed to do when you accept your own answer?" or "You can accept your own answer, and the module doesn't consider that possibility!" In that case, a single user who flags the comment as obsolete would cause the deletion of the comment, even if the comment is not obsolete at all. As moderator, I cannot do anything to reverse that.  Moderators should be able to undelete those comments for which the system decides they can be deleted after being flagged from a single user.
16090
Is answering beyond the scope of the question a valid thing? Or should we just stick to the question asked and ignore any potential bugs which might be present (of course OP is unaware of that, as of now).  To make myself more clear, please have a look at this .  There are 3 answers which talk about the issue asked and that's it. If you look at my answer, I've added an additional point about a potential bug which the OP has missed now (may find out later). So is it a good thing to point out such potential bugs or not? Should this practice be encouraged?
80500
I came across  question, which is fairly old, has 2 very good answers (with a good amount of up-votes), and the OP has stated in his question that both of the answers are acceptable. Yet they have not accepted either and simply left a note in their original question about the "correct" answer.  Is there anything that needs to be looked at here? Should I comment that the OP should accept an answer if they have one? Should I flag it?
91300
I am looking to get some rep by answering unanswered questions. I only have time to answer a few at a time. I take a look at the unanswered list and post some good answers (i think) and afterwards I see that the question was posted over a year ago. The odds of that person coming back to that question after such a long time is not good. Besides that, they probably found their answer somewhere else.  So why do these really old questions show up on the first page of the unanswered list? The person that asked that question already thinks the site sucks cause they didn't get help with their question. Why should a newer unanswered question get burried? Do you want people not to find the new question so it yields the same fate?  feature-request: sort unanswered questions by date desc
65143
I'm fairly responsive to comments left on my answers. This often means updating an answer to incorporate new information or questions that have been added in the comments (or edits to the original question).  It would be useful to flag comments as 'addressed by edit', so that they can be deleted by the commentator, or highlighted for pruning by mods - I don't think this is in scope for the usual 'flag comment'.  More contentiously, it might make sense if comments flagged with 'addressed by edit' were automatically suppressed after a suitable period of time has passed - long enough to rule out silliness with duplicate comments being used to steal comment upvotes.  EDIT I'm not convinced that "This would mean that in the long run, you could delete any comments on your posts without involving others" would be a problem. It is a valid point, so the safeguard would be to have a veto, so that when a poster says 'addressed by edit' the commentator can say 'no it isn't'.  I can see there is still an argument that comments add to a SO users (offline) rep, however I believe mods clean-up posts anyway to remove comment noise, so I don't think anything is really lost.  Moving on to the concerns complicating the UI, I happily concede that a flag next to comments would be the wrong place. Presenting a list of comments plus checkbox at edit time would work, and should improve quality (as comments become prompts when editing).