Many times questions get answered and answered well, but for whatever reason (lack of intelligence, age, language, understanding of how the site works, etc), an answer never gets accepted as the correct answer.
This seems to be a common problem on this site, mainly I think because of the clientèle that we have to deal with (blood from a stone springs to mind...) and that's making the whole site suffer IMHO.
So I am wondering if there is a way that we, as a community, could flag an answer as high quality (kind of the opposite of the low quality flag). With enough flags the answer can then be accepted by the community instead of by the OP (whom we never hear from ever again).
I'm thinking:
- Can only be done on answers with > +(10?) votes
- Can only be done if there is no accepted answer
- Can only be done on questions older than (7?) days
- Requires (5?) flags
- You cannot flag your own post, but you can agree to your own post being flagged in the flag queue (so someone else has to have flagged it first)
- You can only flag if you have enough rep (not my place to decide the level ;) )
Addendum:
Since the comments below have enlightened me to how the "not answered" is decided, another idea occurs to me - something that might possibly be implementable by the devs.
From time to time you come across a truly awesome answer that has no (or maybe one) vote. An answer that someone (* cough * nick * cough *) has obviously spent a lot of time and energy writing. The kind of answer where you think "That's an answer and a half. It deserves more than just one vote".
I would gladly give up some of my own reputation to give that kind of answer 5 votes.