5

Stack Exchange staff have announced an upcoming change to the way answer acceptance works.

Currently, the original poster of a question can accept one non-deleted answer. This does several things,

  • the question poster receives 2 rep, and the answer poster receives 15 rep

  • the answer has an added green tick mark below its score and vote buttons

  • the answer itself is pinned to the top of the list of answers, regardless of sort variable

This change will affect the last of these behaviours, removing the "pin to top".

Staff have indicated this may be configurable per site - each individual site can have this behaviour turned off or left on (with the default setting yet to be determined by consensus and research).

Please indicate by voting on the answers below, which setting you would prefer.

Downvotes will be ignored for this purpose, as they add no useful information. Just upvote one, or both or neither.

Results

Feedback was collated on September 20th, giving ten days to make a decision. This post has been locked to preserve results.

Our consensus is in favour of removing the "pin to top" behaviour for accepted answers.

Option Votes
Remove 6
Keep 2
1
  • This answer on Politics.SE may be of some use - uses a SEDE query to find out the number of questions where the accepted answer is outscored by another answer
    – ImClarky
    Sep 9, 2021 at 13:33

2 Answers 2

6

Remove the "pin to top" behaviour.

I want this behaviour to be removed. An accepted answer should be sorted in the same way as all answers.

3
  • 1
    I've voted for this, but honestly I think it's pretty rare round on this site for us to get into the situation where the poster accepts a "bad" answer so I don't think it's that important what happens either way.
    – Philip Kendall Mod
    Sep 9, 2021 at 11:16
  • 1
    I think the only reason I've voted this way - instead of a neutral vote - is that [rules] is the most popular tag, and similar to the problem SO has, answers will become outdated over time as rules change - and perhaps the OP is not in a position to update to the currently-correct answer. You could probably also bundle in [statistics], and [history] into the same bucket too
    – ImClarky
    Sep 9, 2021 at 12:52
  • @ImClarky I think the [rules] issue can be more complicated than that - if there's a question about a incident in a specific match (e.g. this one), then it doesn't matter if the rules change, the answer should refer to the rules as they were written at the time of the incident and will still be correct even if the rules change.
    – Philip Kendall Mod
    Sep 13, 2021 at 7:58
5

Keep the "pin to top" behaviour.

I want this behaviour to be kept. An accepted answer should be placed at the top of the list.

1
  • 2
    I voted this way, because I think it's sufficiently rare that an accepted answer is not the preferred one (or is outdated); and we get few enough votes here that it's better to let the asker pick which shows up on top, in my opinion.
    – Joe Mod
    Sep 9, 2021 at 21:04

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