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One of the things I've noticed in Quick Answers is that many people tend to "forget" to accept or vote for answers, and instead they just leave the thread and never come back - meaning the poster of an answer will never get his/her rep points for posting an answer that might be the solution to the OP's question.
This gave me an idea: What if CP implemented a system that automatically accepts the highest rated answer after a period of inactivity from the OP in the thread? That way, the poster of an answer is more likely to get the rep points he/she deserves. It would, of course, require people to actually vote for the answer.
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I believe something was being implemented where if there were three or more votes the answer would automatically get marked as answered. Not sure if this was implemented or just a discussion or whether this was Q&A or the programming forums.
Also, what happens when two people give answers to the same question and then none of them are voted for?
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Abhinav S wrote: I believe something was being implemented where if there were three or more votes the answer would automatically get marked as answered.
I've seen this as well in the programming forums, but I'm not sure if I have seen such thing in QA.
Abhinav S wrote:
Also, what happens when two people give answers to the same question and then none of them are voted for?
The idea was that answers with no votes shouldn't be accepted as answer by the system, since the system would have no chance to check which answer is the (most) correct. The best solution would therefore probably be to have the system ONLY check answers that has been rated.
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Kristian Sixhoej wrote: The idea was that answers with no votes shouldn't be accepted as answer by the system, since the system would have no chance to check which answer is the (most) correct. The best solution would therefore probably be to have the system ONLY check answers that has been rated.
Sounds fair enough - and possibly the vote average should be more than 3 (at least) to be even considered as an answer.
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And I say that there is no way an automated system can determine on its own whether or not an answer is acceptable *to the OP*. What *should* happen is that a courtesy email be sent to the OP after X number of days to remind them that they haven't accepted an answer yet, and give them the option of doing so.
This is just as bad as having a user other than the OP marking an answer as accepted.
I'm steadfastly against anybody other the OP as having the ability to mark an answer as accepted.
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001
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You already know most of the users come to Q&A to just ask questions and don't care after there question is answered.
John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote: What *should* happen is that a courtesy email be sent to the OP after X number of days to remind them that they haven't accepted an answer yet, and give them the option of doing so.
What if the answers don't answer user's question. How do we determine that the answer solved his issue and so send him a mail to accept that answer if he hasn't done so?
..Go Green..
modified on Saturday, June 26, 2010 8:23 AM
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If the OP does not mark a post as answer within a certain period of time (say 15 days), then people with enough reputation should be able to mark an answer. And to prevent self-marking, they should only be able mark someone else's post as answer. So if they see a thread where their reply is the answer, they'll just have to pass and wait for another high rep user to mark their post as answer.
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I completely disagree.
What if the OP simply modifies his original question and posts the solution he found? What if NONE of the answers are considered acceptable? Assuming you know whether or not a given answer is "acceptable" to the OP is preposterous, absurd, and just plain inappropriate.
I would personally be highly pissed off if someone else accepted an answer to a question I posted because they think they know better than me what I consider to be an acceptable answer. Besides that, I might find an answer useful in finding my own solution, but that doesn't mean the entire response warrants me marking it as acceptable.
I think you guys are getting a little full of yourselves.
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
-----
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
-----
"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001
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I think we have 2 different expectations of the Q/A forum. Your idea seems to be that it's OP-centric. The OP asks a question, and he marks the answer. My view is different. For me the question is more important than the user posting the question. If someone with high rep (and it's reasonable to assume that it's someone with enough skill/experience) marks a post as answer, then anyone who searches for the same question in future will see the thread and will be able to use the answer.
Now compare this with your expectation that the OP is king. What if he marks an incorrect reply as the answer. Now anyone who searches for this question sees the thread, sees the incorrect answer, and goes away with incorrect and invalid information. I don't think Chris intended it that way. I believe Chris's perspective will be closer to mine than yours.
Example that illustrates my point :
- OP asks : how do I get the path to my running executable
- User-1 replies : just call GetCurrentDirectory
- OP marks this as answer and goes away
- User-2 replies : No, don't do that. Use GetModuleFileName. GetCurrentDirectory may not return the path to the exe always.
- OP never sees User 2 's reply
- 3 months later...
- User-3 searches for this question, gets to this thread via google, sees the incorrect answer (not paying attention to the un-marked reply), an goes away with bad information from a Codeproject thread.
Is this good? No, not at all. The very opposite in fact.
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The OP *is* the king on his questions. You guys are trying to tie things up in a neat little artificial package, and it's not that neat.
There are plenty of vehicles available on a quick-answer question where people who "know better" can chime in, via comments or actual "answers". When I go looking for an answer to a question, I invariably land on StackOverflow and/or an MSDN forum. Usually, there are responses marked as "the answer" but I ALWAYS make it a practice to read the entire thread to see if varying opinions have been offered that are more appropriate to MY question. Why? Because the "accepted answer" for the OP may NOT be an acceptable answer for *me*.
To address your point 5, if the user doesn't see it, it's because he doesn't care. He got the answer that worked for him, and he's moved on. I think a single email after N days asking him to go back and a) review the replies, and b) mark one accepted if he finds one worthy of the tag is sufficient. In the meantime, other users can vote on the answers, at least presenting the idea to a 3rd party that this is is the answer that OTHER USERS would accept.
The way you guys are approaching this smacks just a little too much of big brotherism. Let the OP make the call. It's his call - and ONLY his call - to make.
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
-----
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
-----
"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001
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If a question is 15 days old it's usually out of sight, out of mind. If someone else finds it by searching then often their question will be slightly different than the original so having "the" answer is less valuable than having many potentials that may fit his circumstances better.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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Chris Maunder wrote: If a question is 15 days old it's usually out of sight, out of mind. If someone else finds it by searching then often their question will be slightly different than the original so having "the" answer is less valuable than having many potentials that may fit his circumstances better.
I am not so sure. This approach formally approves question duplication which dilutes the forum content. What's the point of having 5 separate threads all of them asking how a char* can be marshaled from C++ to C# ?
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Unless a feature is implemented that provides the user with a list of questions already asked that might be similar (like the MSDN forums do), there's no earthly way you can prevent duplicate questions. Putting effort into something you can't fix is both a waste of time on your part and annoying to the users.
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
-----
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
-----
"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001
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We already do this.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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Chris Maunder wrote: We already do this.
Do what? Annoy the users? 
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
-----
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
-----
"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001
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If you were closer and unarmed I would slap you.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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Nishant Sivakumar wrote: This approach formally approves question duplication which dilutes the forum content
Not quite Nish
Nothing is being "formally approved". We are allowing duplicate posts, but not formally endorsing them. All systems such as ours do this, and the only alternative is to say that if there is a post that is exactly your post (or similar, since "exact" will rarely, if ever, happen) the disallow posting the duplicate.
Which is actually what we already do - at least in the case of an exact repost.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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Hi Kristian,
The idea was proposed here few days back and I think the team is already working on it.
But I am not very much satisfied with the idea because most of the answers (including good answers) are not voted in the Q&A forum. Choose any member who gives a lot of answer in the Q&A forum. Better choose an MVP so it can be assumed that most of his answers are good. Now check his answers and also check the views for that particular post. You will find that even there are lot of views, number of votes would be 1 or 2 or as in most cases NO Votes.
I liked the MSDN style of Propose as Answer.
We can have a similar system. But that again is similar to the present vote system. If one could propose an answer one could also vote.
Let's everyone put up our suggestions here and help CP come up with the best solution.
I am also thinking of a better idea and if something strikes my mind I will surely put up here. 
..Go Green..
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I'm getting lots of grey blocks containing the message above; they appear to be in areas normally displaying ads. Also, I'm seeing a number of HTML fragments displayed in various parts of the site. If it's any help, I'm using Opera tonight, but I was seeing similar anomalies at work today using Chrome. I've all but given up on IE now - it's hopeless...
[EDIT]
I just checked the grey bits in the footer using the Inspect Element function in Opera (Microsoft hasn't a clue...). The code is a link to admt, and it's using inline HTML style information in the DIV, rather than style tags required under the new standards. Maybe it is an Opera/Chrome thing, since they're both largely compliant with current standards, and IE ignores them completely.
[/EDIT]
[EDIT2]
Yet another quirk I've noticed tonight...
When I post to the Questions & Answers section, my preview looks right, but the final post includes a bunch of escape characters (\) in front of the special characters I actually typed. Weird...
[/EDIT2]
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
modified on Saturday, June 26, 2010 3:44 AM
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have you tried a few CTRL/F5? There has been a little earthquake, and your system may vaguely remember style parts from earlier.
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Luc Pattyn wrote: have you tried a few CTRL/F5?
Yup, that was my first thought.
Luc Pattyn wrote: There has been a little earthquake
Gee, that tiny little earthquake shouldn't have affected the CodeProject servers... 
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
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Is this still happening?
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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The appearance of HTML fragments in ad spaces has stopped, and most of the grey blocks have gone away, but as of now, the greyed out block with the "lack of style" message persists in the footer of the page.
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
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Hi to all the CodeProject Team members who gave their efforts to redesign the CodeProject site. I found it very interesting when I first visited it today morning. First I was confused but then I got it. Here are some of my points/issues that I noticed on the new design:
- The Question & Answers menu is too long to see the last items
- Hovering on the small icon on top of Article section opens up all the menus which is pretty big and all the menus are not visible.
- In Article page, the "Browse Code" should not be visible if I don't have some code files attached to it.
- XAML files are not opening in the "Browse Code" page.
- Didn't find any difference between the Fluid layout and the Fixed layout yet.
- There should be one Voting button near to the Voting Meter. This will be more visible to the reader.
- The comments section is not rendering properly in Google Chrome. I need to Scroll Up & Down to make it render.
Overall the look is great and user friendly except those issues I covered above. I will modify this list once I got more issues over the day.
Thank you CodeProject team. ![Rose | [Rose]](https://www.codeproject.com/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
Don't forget to Click on [Vote] and [Good Answer] on the posts that helped you.
Regards - Kunal Chowdhury | Software Developer | Chennai | India | My Blog | My Tweets | Silverlight Tutorial
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Kristian Sixhoej
