Answer Marking Button For Everyone?
Hello everyone! I'm thinking about ways that we could encourage more people to click on the "Mark as Answer" button on the replies to questions in the forums. In case you've never seen it, the "Mark as Answer" button is visible on every reply to a question thread if:
1.) You are a moderator or "trusted answer tagger" on the forums or;
2.) You are the original question asker for that thread.
A button appears in the title bar of each post, saying "Mark as Answer". If clicked, the thread is marked as answered, and the answer is highlighted.
Currently, we only allow moderators, Microsoft employees, and a few others to mark replies as answers. What does everyone think would happen if we allowedeveryone to mark answers? Do you believe people would mark the wrong answers sometimes? Would it get out of control, or would it actually greatly help the number of answers that were marked?
I'd love to hear your opinion!
That comes with the assumption that an asker (thread starter) explained
everything in
crystal clear detail so that others can provided the exact answer required. That is usually not the case with people thinking one or two lines of vague description are all that's ever needed. And that, would usually lead to a long series of drilling and "investigation" on the helpers' parts, resulting in the "answer" spread thinly across posts. How could one quality a single post as The Answer then? And given that, even moderators cannot guess if the _actual_ problem, versus the seeming problem in text, has been solved.
I think the existing Usefulness marker is already a pretty decent rating mechanism.
I would tend to agree with icelava. But here is an idea:
If you are going to allow everyone to mark replies as answers make it a voting system. You might even weight the votes based on the quantity/quality of a user's activity in the forums. Give the author's vote (if they vote) a higher weight.
With a threshold setup to automatically change a threads status to answered.
Some thoughts on allowing everyone to mark questions as answered...
Would people mark their own responses as answers (and would they sometimes be wrong in their belief that they had posted an answer)?
Would people mark pending questions answered as a denial of service attack?
Would people mark questions answered to reduce the competition and to enhance their own question's chances of being answered?
Can anyone other than the original asker of the question really assess whether the question has been answered?
The MS Moderators and/or MS Employees marking their answers as "Correct" when they are sometimes far from being an
answer, let alone
correct, is
annoying.
If you don't know the answer, you don't know, we understand you can't know everything, but posting some jibber-jabber for the sake of posting and getting a Green Checkmark has got to stop.
When I see a Green Checkmark I expect the post inside contains an answer, not some doubletalk.
I would like the ability to "UnMark as Correct" these kind of "Non Answers"
Thanks,
Carl
Carl,
There is currently the ability to unmark an answer if you orginally made the post. Make use of it too, if you are not happy with the answer, simply unmark it. You can also make use of the 'Was this post helpful?' buttons.
Also, be aware that sometimes we mark our post as an answer if the post is off-topic; this stops the post being displayed in Answered Questions and getting in the way of on-topic posts.
Actually, if everyone had answer marking, everyone would also have "unanswered" marking privileges by legacy of the way the system is implemented, so you'd be able to unmark all of those hastily marked Microsoft answers.
What would everyone think about giving the permissions after five questions have been answered by them? This would make sure that a user has already contributed to the forums before they get automatic answer-marking permissions.
I personally think that's a good idea, although I would do so after more questions answered... like 15 or 20.
I don't think it's a very good idea to give everyone permission, just the people who proved they can give accurate answers themselves.
Yeah, I agree 15 or 20 answers would be the minimum required to trust someone to mark posts as answers. Still, you should be careful about letting people mark their own posts as answers. In the end, the only one who can really judge if an answer is satisfactory is the original poster. A 'trusted' third party can give a good indication, but I'm not sure someone should be allowed to judge their own post. Just look at topics like this one; already some mark their posts as answers prematurely...
Not that I wouldn't mark any of my own posts if I could though; currently half of my correct answers never get marked as such... Another option would be to give posters penalty points every time an original poster unmarks something as an answer; suspending your marking abilities if you reach a certain amount of penalty points. Something like -5 points for everytime this happens and +1 for every correct answer would make people think twice about marking their own posts :)
It seems to be a hot topic, moderators that mark questions as answered. I hear quite a few people about those trigger happy moderators, but I haven't seen them around myself. I think I'm in the wrong (or right) forums.
I don't agree that people should not be permitted to mark their own posts as answered. Like you said yourself, only half of the accurately answered posts are marked as such. This can be quite frustrating. I will only mark my own posts as answered if I'm 95% sure I answered correctly, and only after a couple of days.
I actually think that if more people get answering rights, the complaints about abuse will be getting much, much higher. The people who have moderation rights will probably have answered over 50 posts. Quite a few of them have a few hundred answered posts. If there are already complaints about the moderators, then what will happen if many people get these rights?
Here's my two cents...
Firts, all the comments below are exclusive of moderator input, which must continue to maintain control, and the comments are solely about the general public members accessing these forums.
[Snip] What does everyone think would happen if we allowed everyone to mark answers?
Hmmm. If you let anyone mark a reply as correct I suppose you would have to let anyone mark the reply as NOT correct (or unmark it as correct) as well. I don't think anyone except the original poster really knows if their question got answered sufficiently. It just doesn't make sense to me to try to use a single binary Yes/No flag to indicate what a number of people believe. For this reason, I think leaving it to the original poster to mark as correct (or not) is best. However, you may want to consider augmenting this Yes/No flag with some type of voting process (see below) - this may be best to get others' thoughts on the responses.
[Snip] Do you believe people would mark the wrong answers sometimes?
I don't believe they would do so intentionally. However, it is fairly easy to misunderstand, what a person is really asking or the problem they are posing - in fact, that's why a lot of the posts have follow-up questions about the original post (congratulations to those who put forth this effort to pose these questions).
[Snip] Would it get out of control, or would it actually greatly help the number of answers that were marked?
Sorry, but I don't think the goal should be to get as many responses marked as correct as possible - seems artificial to me. I think the goal should be to improve the quality of the responses - lofty goal, and encourage participation! Many threads end in uncertainty and like life itself, maybe they should stay that way, at least for some time, and be left up to the reader to decide.
These forums are GREAT in my opinion, as long people continue to participate. For example, I have recently learned that posting responses to problems that I can solve (usually the easier ones because I am fairly new to this .NET stuff) helps the forum overall, even though it may be a trivial problem, I am helping to solve. The reason it helps the forum is because the person that gets his question answered is more likely to come back and hopefully continue to participate and also start answering questions of others. The snowball effect!
Counting the number of views is good. In addition to the "Mark reply as correct", how about adding a ranking system allowing any individual reader to rank each thread as one of the following:
A. Helped a lot
B. Helped a little
C. Neutral or no comment
D. Didn't help
Of course, each member could only "vote" once per thread. Keeping a count on these "opinions" could help narrow our searches and help to find what we may be looking for quicker. This improves the quality, I think, and may encourage more participation, I hope.
Sorry this was so long, thanks for asking, and keep up the good work.
This is pretty timely. I tend to agree w/ Zep above. I've had several occasions where threads that I started were marked as "answered" before I had even seen the response. Several times when the answer wasn't clear I had to change the status back to "unanswered" so I could ask a follow-up question. Kinda annoying.
I'll make an educated guess that there are really a couple of issues going on here beyond "who can press the button":
1. Here's a *big* assumption on my part, so if I'm wrong let me know: I'll wager MS tracks metrics on when questions were posted, responded to and marked as answered. The shorter the time gap between these events the better the metrics. This may encourage some to improve the metrics by marking their responses as the correct answer. Its just human nature.
2. I'll also wager that many members who start threads "never get around" to marking the correct answer. Shame on us. This probably makes the metrics look bad, thus resulting in the normal human behavior in item 1 above.
OK, so off the soapbox now ... here are some suggestions.
1. If I start a thread, I should be the only member that can mark it as answered. Otherwise, this becomes a free-for-all instead of the very helpful resource it can be.
2. If metrics are in fact being used and I don't "get around" to marking a response as the answer within two business days, then the moderator should be allowed to mark the question as answered. That's only fair.
3. If metrics are being used, the delay between the posted response and pressing the answered button should not negatively effect the metrics.
I think the voting scheme indicating *quality* mentioned above is a really good idea and should be added as an extra feature. This would allow all to comment on the usefullness of responses. Usefullness would be a VERY GOOD metric.
All the best, and thanks to everyone who works for MS who have provided timely, high quaity answers to my questions...
DB
Let me start off here by saying that this has been a really, really useful thread, and I'm happy that everyone here is passionate enough about the topic to take the time to respond. It makes me really feel like we are doing something good for our .NET community.
First of all, Doug, yes we (Microsoft) are actively tracking the rates at which questions are getting answered, and that metric depends on the accurate marking of answers. Is it artificial? You bet. But the metrics drive the product groups here at Microsoft to engage with the community, answer questions, and create better forums by doing so. I personally am sending out emails to everyone in DevDiv here at Microsoft every two weeks were every team is getting evaluated on what % of questions are getting answered in two days on their forums. Our goal is 60% answered in 2 days, 80% answered overall. I could go into a lot of detail behind where these numbers come from, but the important piece of information is that we are tracking it.
Have these metrics caused over-aggressive answer marking? In some cases, yes, and we have been monitoring for this and engaging the teams as necessary. Something I've noticed when browsing the forums is that many questions really are answered, but the answer never got marked. That's because the original asker never came back, and we only have a small amount of moderators to read through the posts (<1% of all users on the forums are moderators). Why not give the answer marking (not moderation privileges) to everyone, we thought? Would people really abuse the community that they obviously already are using, just by being here?
Our conclusion is that many probably would, but by giving answer marking privileges to everyone who has answered more than 5 questions would really focus down to people who have already helped people, and are much less likely to abuse the privilege. It turns out that only about 3% of all people have answered 5 or more questions.
We haven't implemented this yet, and we could always change our mind if it gets abused. What do you think?
I (and I am guessing most others) read most of the posts in our topics of interest, marked answered or not.
I'd say do away with answer marking all together. If a post has an answer, you'll find it, if not you either answer it or move on to the next post.
Carl
Hi joe,
How about a special button where users can click to tag the thread as "needing attention from moderators"? The button is similar to "Report" button, except most users hesitated to click "report" to threads that are left by original poster. At least, even those without answer marking priviledges may click some thing like "Please mark answer to this thread", so the moderators that is around can see hints that the thread is answered yet unmarked.
Anyway, I'm in favor to giving answer marking priviledges to member if he/she reached certain number of answered post (probably 20 is good a minimum).
-chris
