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I often see questions which have one or more answers that are comprehensive, correct, helpful, and have many upvotes, and yet the question remains without a marked answer. Generally, it seems like the asker either forgot about it, solved it on their own and never updated the question, or something else like that. I occasionally leave a comment reminding people to mark an accepted answer if their problem has been solve, which usually is enough to encourage them to do so, but I feel kind of awkward doing that, especially if it's a question in which my answer was one of the higher-voted ones, since it feels sort of like fishing for "compliments" (or in this case reputation or badges), even though that's not my intent.

Is there an automatic reminder to question-askers if they have answers and they haven't accepted one after a given amount of time? If not, could this be implemented? Perhaps having a notification show up in the user's queue if there are 1 or more answers with 5 or more votes after a week, saying "It looks like your question 'blah blah' still hasn't been answered" and linking to the question might work. Or, should I just continue to leave polite comments about it and hope that works for people?

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This is all we have at the moment, a small notice on the user profile, which a user that doesn't understand the accept system probably wouldn't look at anyways.

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    The problem with this approach is that it shows up for all questions which have an answer or are past certain number of views. In my case, I have several question which do not have a good answer and appear red. I think that there should be a different type of notification if there are answers with lots (say 5+) of upvotes. Even better! There should be a separate section with questions which have unaccepted answers with large number of upvotes. This way user could at a glance see all possible candidates for accepting answers.
    – AndrejaKo
    Commented Sep 23, 2010 at 20:09
  • I'd say this Q&A are eligible for the FAQ (Help --> Help Center --> Answering).
    – agtoever
    Commented Aug 11, 2014 at 6:58
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I think maybe a more persuasive approach, such as banning a user may be called for. I have viewed several profiles where multiple questions have been asked without a single accepted answer. Accepting answers not only rewards those providing the answer, but allows visitors to the questions to quickly see the solution. Users that repeatedly ask questions without accepting correct answers are not maintaining their responsibilities to the forum.

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    This is a bad idea. I think punishing people like this goes against the stack exchange philosophy as I understand it. Also, it's possible that some of the questions you refer to don't have a CORRECT answer, they just have popular ones. some issues can only be determined fixed by the person that asked them.
    – JNK
    Commented Sep 23, 2010 at 2:23
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    I downvoted, because I don't think people should be punished for being ignorant. Some users just never RTFM or fit in, so let's just ignore them and get on with our lives. All that matters is that great quality answers were provided
    – Ivo Flipse Mod
    Commented Sep 23, 2010 at 21:17
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    So someone with say 15 questions and not a single accepted answer is contributing by asking the questions in the first place. There are some great quality answers provided and all a person who is looking for a great quality answer has to do is try them until one works. Sorry, but I still think you're being a too understanding.
    – Beaner
    Commented Sep 27, 2010 at 20:17

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