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We mark things as answers when they are answers. Anyone's reply can be marked an answer. It's mostly been us answering so far (we're in there all the time to k

We mark things as answers when they are answers. Anyone's reply can be marked an answer. It's mostly been us answering so far (we're in there all the time to keep everything moving smoothly at launch), but over time other people will come in and offer answers as well. Here's a non-37signls answer, for example: http://answers.37signals.com/basecamp/132-printing-sections-of-the-site http://answers.37signals.com/basecamp/132-printing-sections-... We expect to see more of these over time. We are also exploring ways to incentivize people to answer each other's question.

blasdel 17y ago
That wasn't my point -- the impression was that questions get marked as answered as soon as you've read it and either replied or picked an existing answer. While you may be the sheriff, judge, jury, and executioner of your product; you aren't the arbiter of the asker's mind. There's a reason none of the existing systems work this way: not even YA or SO fucked this up when cloning Ask Metafilter. I checked back and it looks like you've refrained from insta-answering discussion questions where you're having a back-and-forth. I think a much better model would be to make the answered flag normally asker-only, or do away with it all together. Instead add a [staff] flag on questions that staff have answered in, and when you think a normal user has already answered the question effectively (with or without approval from the asker), you should explicitly call out their answer as good (which then causes the [staff] flag to be added).