Getting the most out of DevCentral: User Accepted Answers

As you may have noticed, we recently added a few new features to our Q&A experience.  In this article, we will explore the User Accepted Answer feature.  When a user asks a question and that question receives several answers, another user who reads the entire Q&A thread might wonder which of the answers is really the best one.  Maybe several different solutions were presented in all the various answers.  Maybe one of them works better than the others.  How do you know which answer is the best? 

User Accepted Answer

The User Accepted Answer is exactly what it sounds like…the user who asked the question has marked a certain answer as “accepted” according to his own personal standards for acceptable answers.  Of course, each user has different standards by which he will accept an answer, so the “User Accepted” answer simply means that the given answer has proven to be acceptable for that specific user.  When an answer is marked “User Accepted”, it will move to the top of the list of answers and be highlighted as shown in the screenshot below.

If you want to mark an answer as “User Accepted”, you simply navigate to the question you asked and look for the “checkbox” button shown to the left of each answer (just below the voting buttons).  When you click on that checkbox, it will mark that specific answer as “User Accepted”.  Of course, you will only see the “checkbox” button option on the questions that you ask.  See the screenshot below with the checkbox button circled:

Q&A Listing

When we back out into the main Q&A page, you’ll notice three boxes on the right side of each question…the first is the number of votes it has received, the second is the total number of answers it has received, and the third is the number of views it has received.  Our recent upgrade highlights the “answers” box with a darker shade of color when that specific question has an “accepted” answer.  This allows you to know right away that a question has an accepted answer before you ever click to see the details of the question.