MSDN Forums Answer Marking

One of the major community channels we have been working on in the DDCPX team is the new MSDN Forums.  Our forums have been very successful so far (over 1,500 confirmed answers last week alone!) and one of the reasons is our "answer marking" ability.  Whenever a user posts a thread to the forums, they must select whether it is a comment or a question.  If it is a question, every reply to the question is potentially an answer.  This is where "answer marking" comes in.

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 reply to a question thread, with the text "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.  This is because this is a trusted group of people that has demonstrated that they have a great deal of comprehension about the subject matter, and definitely know what is and is not an answer.

The interesting question is:  what would happen if we allowed everyone 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?  It's something we are thinking about--from some random non-scientific spot checks of the forums, about 30% of the "unanswered" questions are actually answered questions that have never been marked.  How do we fix this?

I'd love to hear your opinion, and we are into "dogfooding" what we make--so instead of the comments section this time, why not head over to the forums and post a reply to the thread I started over there?  Hope to see you there!

https://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=149920&SiteID=1

Joe Morel

Program Manager