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Questionable practice of accepting answers on behalf of others in Unity Answers

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by flberger, Jun 7, 2013.

  1. flberger

    flberger

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    Hi,

    this is a follow-up thread to this question an Unity Answers.

    Background: a certain level of karma allows users to accept answers to other users' questions at Unity Answers. This happened to me in this question.

    I am an avid user of Stackoverflow and other Stackexchange sites. This nanny-like behaviour is unheard-of there, and would be considered rude. I was thus completely baffled when it happened here.

    Bunny83's rationale is that good answers should not stay around unaccepted, since Answers is more of a knowledge base than a Q&A site. Fair enough.

    But there are several things that I feel highly uncomfortable with:

    • Apparently there is no fixed protocol for this. Bunny83 claims to wait 7 days, yet my question was nanny-accepted not even 48hs after asking. I have a day job. I simply cannot follow up to questions that fast.
    • Once another user has accepted an answer, the user can not un-accept the answer and accept a different one. To me that goes very much against the idea of a collaborative site, let alone the right to state publicly what works and what doesn't for one's problem.
    • The accepting user is invisible if you don't have enough karma. Thus the accepting user can't even be asked to un-accept the answer and give control back to the asking user.
    • There is no place in the FAQ, as far as I can see, that states acceptance by others is an official policy.

    If at all possible I would kindly ask for an official policy with a predictable time frame before answers get accepted in one's own name.

    How do you feel about this?
     
  2. landon912

    landon912

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    The problem is that too many good answers go without being accepted. The policy is nessary(I'm sure it's in there somewhere), but should give the asker the option to overturn the accepted answer.
     
    Last edited: Jun 7, 2013
  3. RalphTrickey

    RalphTrickey

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    I agree with flberger, in my case there wasn't even an answer to the question it was simply closed with a couple of snarky comments about how I hadn't provided feedback on the comments in what a couple of people felt was a timely manner. I have a day job and was planning to research it that weekend. Not a friendly way to build a community, and I don't think I'll go back there. I'd rather use the forums where someone can't arbitrarily close the question. It's a shame since I use the the stackexchange sites for several other subjects.

    The really funny thing is that the person that closed it apparently doesn't know how to use the site. He had posted something which was a good answer to a question. I don't think it was an answer to my particular question, but it was well researched and fairly comprehensive which was a big plus and I would probably have asked the person to change it to a response and marked it as an answer if I hadn't received a better answer or we could have had a dialog on his answer. Unfortunately, I couldn't since it was a comment not an possible answer. It's a shame since it was a good answer that's now buried.

    I'd like to see a 2 week minimum on activity to allow people with day jobs a chance to respond before arbitrarily closing a question unless it's an obvious duplicate/homework/etc.

    My 2c,
    Ralph
     
  4. Graham-Dunnett

    Graham-Dunnett

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    There is no policy. Users with high enough Karma can accept answers to questions they did not post. It requires 5000 Karma to do this. The site trusts that people who have contributed to this extent know what they are doing. Overall far too many questions on the site get answers accepted, which penalises new users who do contribute. They don't get the karma boost that accepting their answer would give them. So, the more long-term users do this. I completely understand that if there are many answers to a question the original questioner might have a strong view about which answer is the "correct one". Unfortunately, that's a rare situation on Answers.

    If you disagree with the accepting of an answer, just leave a comment on the answer and say you don't agree. I'm sure one of the high karma users will unaccept for you. Or, best case, shortly you'll have the karma to make the change yourself.

    Answers is not SO or SE. (SE kicked us off their service because we didn't fit their model.)

    I fixed the wording on the FAQ.
     
  5. robertbu

    robertbu

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    A very high percentage of Unity Answers users are "drive-by" askers that either ask a single question or only drop in once in a rare while to have a specific question answered. And these "drive-bys" rarely mark a question as accepted. The result is that weekly there are hundreds of correctly answered questions that are not accepted. And this lack of accepted answers is a real problem for users of the "database" of knowledge contained in UA. Beginning users often have little guidance about the correct answer to questions they find when they search UA, and more advanced users have to thrash through all the material (often testing things), to get to the answer.

    flberger - to give you an idea of the level activity, with three weeks on the list, you have a Karam score of 80. That puts you in the top 7% of all users. I can understand your frustration. I'd likely feel the same way, especially if the incorrect answer is accepted. But in the thousands of accepted answer I've read, this is only the second time someone has complained about the practice of someone else accepting an answer. I'm sure there are more, but compared to the huge number of unaccepted answers, the number is small. There are only around 50 people who can accept an answer for someone else. And of those only around 20 are active on UA on a weekly basis, and of those only around five have the breadth of knowledge to read through a list of questions and know for most of them if the answers are correct or not. And there is little incentive for those 20 to look back a week or more to older questions.

    RalphTrickey - I agree the way your question was handled was rude. People answering questions on UA face a huge number of people who never respond to answers in any way which leads to a level of frustration. And the person who closed your question is not the same person who made the rude comment.

    I guess my bottom line is that your issue is real, but it is completely overwhelmed by the issue of questions not be accepted by the person asking them. The ability to allow someone with higher karma to accept an answer is in part to address the huge number of unaccepted answers, but there will be unintended consequences.
     
  6. Hikiko66

    Hikiko66

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    If people with high karma are accepting incorrect answers, then that can be handled on a case by case basis.
    More problems (and work) would arise with the alternative.

    That it didn't work out optimally in this particular case is neither here nor there. It is insignificant in the larger scheme of things. There is no perfect method, there is only the better method, and it is already being used.
     
    Last edited: Jun 7, 2013
  7. flberger

    flberger

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    Dear Graham, I am afraid this is not true.

    In my case the answer has been accepted by user Ben Stoneman ♦♦, who currently has a karma of 673. Clearly way below 5000.

    Thanks. That is a step in the right direction, as I perceive it.
     
  8. superpig

    superpig

    Drink more water! Unity Technologies

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    Yeah, that particular thing seems like a bad idea to me. If it's deemed that users are sufficiently competent to recognise when something is the answer to their question, then they must also be competent enough to recognise when something isn't the answer to their question. Any other position seems inconsistent to me.

    I don't think the 'leave a comment and someone will fix it for you' approach is a very good idea because lots of users stop looking at posts once they're marked as having accepted answers. This means both that the odds of someone coming along to fix the problem drop sharply, and also that you miss out on everyone else not posting an actual answer to your original question.

    It's not like the software couldn't support moderators being able to 'lock' the answer mark on a problem post. But I really doubt that it'd be necessary... any user who starts causing problems with this stuff is likely to start causing problems by posting new questions and stuff anyway, you'd have to just up and ban them regardless.
     
  9. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    So you're saying that no other method is superior to the one already in place? That's interesting, because based on flberger's points alone I can already think of a bunch of ways to improve it.

    1. You shouldn't be able to accept an answer to a question that's not yours until 7 days has passed from the posting of the answer. That solves the "never getting accepted" problem while giving new users who don't live on the Internet plenty of time to read the answer, try what it suggests, and get back to it. 48 hours is ridiculous - I'm an active online member and do hobby development most days, but I still couldn't be confident of getting back to a specific online interaction having in less than 48 hours.

    2. Show who accepted answers! I mean, seriously, why would you not show that? Not showing it implies that the person who asked the question accepted it, which is misleading in a whole bunch of ways.

    3. Give the original poster a way to change the accepted answer to another post, even if they don't have the ability to un-accept an answer on its own.
     
  10. Hikiko66

    Hikiko66

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    1) Don't ask a question and then disappear for days, problem solved. Do you do that on other forums too? Start a thread asking for people to donate their time/effort/knowledge to you, and then just leave? They are probably going to want to ask you for further information. After two days they've moved on and their time has often been wasted. If you aren't going to look at it till Friday, post it on Thursday.

    2) Seems reasonable.

    3) Once you have been overruled I don't think you should be able to reverse that.
     
    Last edited: Jun 8, 2013
  11. Graham-Dunnett

    Graham-Dunnett

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    Sigh. It requires 5000 Karma, or to be a super-user on the site to do this.
     
  12. Graham-Dunnett

    Graham-Dunnett

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    I guess what bothers me more is that Neurological provided a perfectly good answer to flberger question. Neurological has not gotten any karma from being helpful other than upvotes. It's unlikely that others will contribute now because the question is now hidden behind 2 days of newer questions, and the question has an answer. That leaves Neurological out-of-luck, and *possibly* less willing to contribute again. Accepting on Answers means the OP, or someone who knows what they are talking about, based on their reputation, wants the world to know is the canonically correct one.

    Who are these power users who are going to spend their time 7- or 14-days after the event accepting answers for posts where the questioner is too lazy, or a one-trick-pony who'll never "do the right thing".

    Anyway, I am certain that flberger is going to be a active contributor on Answers and will accept the correct answer to his question.
     
  13. superpig

    superpig

    Drink more water! Unity Technologies

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    I don't think anyone's arguing that other users should not be able to accept answers at all. Just for modifications to the way it's done.

    Your account of Neurological being out-of-luck is very similar to what would happen if the accepted answer were actually wrong, only it'd be flberger who was out of luck.

    Sure - but equally, as I implied, who are these power users who are going to spend their time 4- or 5-days after the event reading already-answered posts to check that the OP hasn't objected to the accept?
     
  14. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    I wonder what answers I'd get as accepted if I posed the question "How do we all get along?"
     
  15. Dabeh

    Dabeh

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    We don't all get along though and the more diverse we become the more issues we are having. I blame myself for this. Sorry guys.
     
    Last edited: Jun 8, 2013
  16. Eric5h5

    Eric5h5

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    None—I'd close the question as being too subjective and tell you to post discussion questions on the forums. ;)

    --Eric
     
  17. RalphTrickey

    RalphTrickey

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    robertbu,
    Thanks for the detailed answer. I'm glad that it's an exception and not the norm.

    I checked my question, and it looks like the comment has been promoted to an answer (as I said, it's a good answer, just maybe not to my question ;) ) I was able to add a comment to it. I thought I'd tried to comment before but wasn't able to which added to the aggravation. <shrug>

    Is there any way to get emails when someone comments on a question? I had notifications turned on for that question which I assumed meant that I would be emailed and never received any notice that anyone had commented on it.

    Thanks,
    Ralph
     
  18. Eric5h5

    Eric5h5

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    If you have notifications turned on, you get emails when someone comments. Except when the system occasionally stops working....

    --Eric
     
  19. flberger

    flberger

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    Hi,

    here comes the big uber quoting answer. :) Thanks for all your replies so far.

    First and foremost, I totally recognise that maintaining UA is a difficult thing, as migrating from a forum to a Q&A format probably always is. UA has a lot of beginner level trivial questions, and a lot of users posting follow-up questions or comments as answers.

    Having said that, people coming from StackExchange sites are most of the time well versed in that format. You might want to keep these people active on UA.

    In my mind you are trusting the SE-like system too little. I think you want a knowledge base *now*, and that's fine. However voting-based Q&A sites age like wine (or whisky, if you prefer): the best answer will eventually show by upvoting. On countless occasions on stackoverflow.com I've found the most useful answers to be the ones with the highest votes - not necessarily the accepted one, if there even was any. Trust the voting system. In my mind, save for the reputation, accepted answers are not even necessary for a site to be useful.


    One of them being the potential to shoo away the very people who actually get what a Q&A site is about. ;-)


    I know about the trickeries of computer-mediated communication, but that came across as arrogant. Systems who deem just requests for (a little) change insignificant have historically never fared well, you know.


    +1

    Yes, all of that. I would very much like to see that in UA.

    That, Na-Ra-Ku, would be the fitting occasion to ask about your day job. I currently am an employed full-time game dev, 8hs straight a day, doing his first Unity project. When I encounter a problem, I'll post a question while all the relevant information is still in my head - I'm not taking notes to post it later. However as I have to deliver work (as I'm not getting paid waiting for answers), I'll move on to a different task, and yes, combined with meetings and private life it might actually take a couple of days until I find enough time to come back to the problem and review proposed solutions - that also takes time, mind you.

    I am an avid bug reporter at Gentoo Linux, several open source projects, and a regular user of StackExchange sites. No one ever has imposed a 48hs limit on any of these sites or else deemed a question as a "waste of time of others". In fact, delays from days to weeks are the rule rather than the exception there.

    I know that might be hard to accept in the Twitter and WhatsApp age. ;-)


    I think you fail to understand what a Q&A site is about. As the one asking a question about a specific problem, I by definition am the only authority who can confirm whether *my* problem has actually been solved, here, on my desk.

    Overruling, if necessary, works by *voting* - not by restricting the asking person from accepting an answer she deems correct.


    *Yet*. He now has. What makes all you people so hasty?


    As a matter of fact, someone did. :)

    Upvoting means that any participant wants the world to know the very same thing. That is the idea of crowdsourcing votes, see above.

    Case is closed for me for now. I hope to see the proposed changes take place in UA. Thanks for your feedback.

    Cheers, flberger