I submitted a question on Stack Overflow and when I went back to check answers I saw two. I immediately saw two answers, but the first one which happens to be more detailed and a better explanation (to some degree).   I checked that one as the correct solution. I saw the other person's solution, and it is also correct. He commented to me that he was first.  I want to clarify in a thread where there are multiple right answers. Should whomever's first get the correct solution or whomever is better explained when the next person comes?  Question:
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Lately I've been getting some good answers to some specific questions. However, I've been hesitating on what answer I should accept.  Do I go with the short quick answer or do I accept a later answer where someone has elaborated on the previous answer with some code?  It's not really important but it kind of bugs me to not accept an answer when people have taken the trouble of replying.  Here's two examples:
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I have looked at the various help pages but I couldn't find a clear guideline for the following issue: often enough someone will ask in the same post (i.e. in the same SE-question) a whole bunch of questions (in the plain English sense of the word), which while may be about the same topic are nevertheless sufficiently distinct that each may require several paragraphs of text to answer adequately.   I can see an upside for leaving related questions grouped together from the asker's perspective: "there's a thread (on SE) answering all my questions about topic T!" On the other hand, from the perspective of organizing questions by having a clear heading/title for each (actual) question and so forth, i.e. from the perspective of SE being a fairly structured database of Q&amp;As instead of being a more like a collection of forum threads "I'm confused about topic T", the omnibus question-list approach seems clearly sub-optimal.  The omnibus approach also makes the issue of accepting answers (and perhaps reviewing such actions) difficult: if two different users give replies to different parts/sub-sets of the question-list, which one is the most adequate one? Even upvoting all partial answers seems iffy because it actually penalizes the user(s) who provides(s) the most complete answer to the question-list: since a user can only give at most one upvote to another user's answer, if user X provides answers to A &amp; B in the same SE-answer, he can only get at most one upvote from user Y, whereas if these were two different SE-answers, he could get two upvotes from user Y.  So, given the above problems, which I think are real enough, is there anything in the SE system addressing list-of-questions question splitting?
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When a new question is asked how are the answers sorted?  I just answered a question and there were two other answers.  All three answers have 0 votes and no edits.  Immediately after I answered my answer appeared first.  Now the order refreshed,  it appears they are sorted by reputation.
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I asked  that turned out to have multiple correct answers. How do I pick between them to determine which to accept?  All of the answers were different. They were not the same answer given multiple times.
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So I went to a question I had an answer for and noticed that the op had already voted an answer as being correct. The particular answer had a list of links.   So I thought to myself, wouldn't it be better to have a more complete correct answer instead of having more smaller answers? In other words, instead of adding a new answer I edited the correct one and added the link there.  I find it better for two main reasons: a) the correct answer would be more complete and b) I am not looking for votes, any votes will go to the guy with the correct answer.  In case it matters, the question was:
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I recently (today) asked a question that received what seems to be a clear, concise answer, but one that's beyond my ability to understand (I'm at the cut-and-paste stage with JavaScript, and the answer seems to assume more knowledge than I actually have).  Is it considered better to ask follow-up questions as comments to the answer given, or should I post "fresh" questions to Stack to help me understand the answer that's been given?
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NB: I'm not sure if this is actually a bug, or if I just don't know enough about what constitutes a new user. It just seems off to me.  The first post in question:   :   In the context of reviews, is a new user just someone who has never posted an answer no matter their age or rep?  Also: How is it possible for a user to have -1 other answers? Could this be related?
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I have often wondered at the practice on Stack&nbsp;Overflow, Server&nbsp;Fault, and the other sites where someone will ask a question and an answer will come in that says Look here: http://link elsewhere. Rarely will the link have exactly the answer necessary -- often it's an entire article -- yet these answers get voted up.  Why is that, exactly? I realize this is subjective, but my own thoughts are that one should try and give the answer (even if the answer is 'no, it can't be done' or 'no, I don't think it can be done' -- very different answers) and then if you have a link that explains it, go ahead and post it within the answer.  What does the community think about this?     For more information, see  in the .
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I have an answer that I'm certain is technically correct. However, it continues to be downvoted. The answer has already been noted in comments on other answers to be better. It goes more in-depth than the others, yet it continues to be downvoted.  The already upvoted answers were nowhere close initially, and I had already commented on them to say why it is wrong...  Isn't there a limit for that? Shouldn't something be catching this?
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Following sequence of events occurred on :   First answer was posted, but was wrong. I posted my answer, which was correct :-) First answer was then modified to match my answer (with attribution)   Meanwhile, the first answer got a total of four up-votes, some from when it was still wrong. My answer has one. There is no accepted answer yet.  I guess this falls into the "grin-and-bear-it-and-move-on" category? What are the ethics of essentially posting a different answer which is still timestamped with the time of an earlier, incorrect answer? Is this flaggable?
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There have been discussion earlier if similar but different questions should all go into one question post or into several independent (which may link to each other). The general consensus is to ask several separate questions:      I fully agree on that. However, when I do it, often enough I get votes as exact duplicate.  One example:    closed as exact duplicate of    It is obviously not an exact duplicate because it asks about try_lock which does something different than lock. It still may be that the answers may be the same, however, I am not sure about that (and the people who closed it also don't, regarding to their comments).  I am wondering how I should handle it in the future. Because of such problems, I start to put several questions again into one question. But then I often don't really know what I should choose as the answer if they only answer one of the questions.  When I had them separated and the second and the second one gets closed, I am also not exactly sure what I should do if the first question was already answered but the answer does not answer my second question (see my example above -- the answer about lock does not mention try_lock at all).
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While reviewing the 10k queue just now, I noticed that someone has evidently searched for and flagged self-accepted answers like        What is the proper way to handle ? Should they be flagged as "not an answer", or should they be left alone?  On the one hand, these answers obviously make no attempt to answer the question. On the other hand, these answers may imply that "I'm no longer looking for an answer — don't bug me."
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Some badges like the  requires one to be the first to answer. I have cases where my answer was accepted like , and the answer previous to mine was deleted, thus making my answer the only one.  Is a deleted answer counted as the first answer?  Does it prevents a question for awarding the "first to answer" type of badges?  I understand that some answers might be related to experience, but I would be inclined to accept an answer that provide an official documented reference.
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I posted a question somewhere that said...     Can anyone tell me how I can solve this?   ...but someone edited it to...      Can anyone tell me how can I solve this?    ...and it was accepted.  That's wrong isn't it? Can someone explain how that's wrong?
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Duplicate questions are "solved" &#8212; it's clear what to do with them, there're tools to deal with them... but what happens when two users post the same answer? This happens a fair bit, particularly on questions with simple answers ("Click this button"-type ones).  Do we upvote both answers, since they are both correct? Do we upvote the first one (although if the answers were posted within a few minutes of each other, after an hour it's impossible to tell as they both show up as "answered 1 hour ago")? Do we upvote the currently highest voted one? Do we upvote one and downvote the other? Do we flag one (seems a little excessive)? Something else?
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I have a situation where different users have asked questions and I answered them. The problem is not that they haven't accepted the answer which can tell me that it is correct or not. But they are actually not responsive and it seems to me that answer is being ignored. Or they asked the question just for the sake of asking.  See -the user was last seen yesterday, the same day it was answered.  -the user was last seen today.   which is also upvoted by a fellow user, but the OP is seen till days after it was answered and is not even commenting.  I went through a lot of question on meta on similar situation such as  where Anna says that it is completely voluntary for users to accept it.   But then again, I believe it is becoming a fashion, to ask a question read the answer as a suggestion and leave it.  It is discouraging me. I am not saying that my answers or suggestions are 100 percent working but I atleast need be told so I can improve it. And more importantly I am not the only one facing this.  Please advise.  EDIT : Well, I got a lot of suggestions from the answers and comments combined below and I have to say that I agree with what Cody Gray has to say and just keep on answering the questions, the returns(good or bad) may be now,later or never and just move on. However, in my own defence I would also say that I did not raised this question to pin point any user but a bad practice that I find worthy of discussing. Thanks.
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Yesterday i was trying to answer 2 questions on SO, but when i finished typing the questions was closed because they were duplicate.  One of the question was answered by a really not that good of an answer (so the question is closed, but that answer is the only one to show), and the second question had no answer at all.  Now if someone will see the first question and its answer, he will be giving the sense that this answer is ok to work with it, and no one can give other answers, or they won't bother as that question is closed, so those users will be using the wrong way.   The second answer is actually more important, because the question had actually couple of right answers, and couple of right ways to do what the OP wanted, but the duplicate that was linked to it was a specific one way (the OP asked for a specific way to do it, so i can't answer with the other way to do it as it won't be answering the question), but again, because the question is closed, no one will bother answering it or take a look if its really a duplicate?  I don't have enough points to comment or chat, so i can't do anything about it, but SO is about helping people to understand code, the first question was a typo of the OP and needed exactly 2 lines to answer it (first line the code, and second is where his problem was), the second question had few answers but yet the duplicate only specifically talking about one of those answers.  So i kinda have 2 questions, do we really need to close questions without giving any answer? If a questions have couple of ways to do it, does it really a duplicate of a question that is only specifically talking about 1 way to do it?