"Best answer" is a useful feature and takes you straight to the solution. Obviously it's up to the OP to choose which answer helped them best. But quite a few times recently I've noticed the OP marking their own post as Best Answer and in that post talking about how the advice from another member solved their problem. This is an abuse of the feature and means you still have to search for the post that helped most.

 

The forum software should only allow the OP to mark another members post.

Kevin, I would respectfully disagree.  While the OP certainly shouldn't mark their own posting as best when they've gotten the answer from another poster, I find most instances of this to be when the OP found the answer on their own or from a source outside Avsim and wanted the solution to be known to the community.  That's valuable followup.  I'd hate to remove the ability to do that from the OP and would rather see gentle corrections to those who abuse it.

 

For what it's worth,

 

Scott

Who cares?

Who cares?

It's unhelpful if people mark their own post rather than the post that actually provided the answer. You have a post marked as best answer which doesn't have an answer in it.

Kevin, I would respectfully disagree. While the OP certainly shouldn't mark their own posting as best when they've gotten the answer from another poster, I find most instances of this to be when the OP found the answer on their own or from a source outside Avsim and wanted the solution to be known to the community. That's valuable followup. I'd hate to remove the ability to do that from the OP and would rather see gentle corrections to those who abuse it.

 

For what it's worth,

 

Scott

That's a good point. I haven't seen anyone make a post like that but it would be wrong to disable it in that case.  I'm not sure that gentle corrections are going to work though. It's probably not worth the reaction you might get.

 

However, as OP in this thread, I think i can now see what might be misleading people. The button to mark the best answer is actually labelled "Mark Solved". If it was labelled "Best Answer" then it might encourage OPs to select the post that actually answered their question rather than what looks like marking the thread as solved.

I tried to mark Scott's post as 'best answer' but was unable to!!!  

I tried to mark Scott's post as 'best answer' but was unable to!!!

Only I can do that. How much is it worth?

Only I can do that. How much is it worth?

Well, you and any moderator can do just that... :ph34r:

Who cares?

Kevin!

 

Socks.