manofchalk said:
Anyone with 5 BA's of their own can un/select a Best Answer in a Question type thread, except their own posts.
There has been no small amount of discussion about this topic within the Moderator forums, but for the time being, this is how it is and will stand.
1st want to say thanks for a great resource. I don't hang out here but great to know I can get quality answers when I occasionally get stumped.
I thought I had posted this but it does not seem to be appearing. Apologies if it is a duplicate.
1 FWIW and 1 Feature Request below.
Just want to add a FWIW on the BA issue. Just got an email that a BA was assigned to a post I added end of Oct. The BA was for a response that really in no way solved the issue other than to eliminate possible alternates to what the problem turned out to be. In the end I discovered the problem myself, so in truth I provided the best answer. What i actually find a little annoying is that the last post in the thread (mine -
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1858469/deeply-h...) asks for more detail about the answer that was supplied and no response was ever forthcoming, but the previous answer was still marked as the BA. I in no way am disparaging the effort the poster made in an attempt to help me solve a vexing problem, and very much appreciate that attempt, which ultimately did lead to finding a solution, although unrelated to the suggestions. Is there some attempt to always mark a BA even when there really is not one? I'm guessing there is a FAQ about BAs somewhere but could not find it on cursory review.
As for the feature request, I am wondering if there is any possibility of collecting the BAs for the most common problems that have more than one or two possible solutions into a kind of solution FAQ. As an example, in my recent post I was looking for a way to find what was taking up space on a USB drive that was not visible in Win Explorer. I spent alot of time looking at past posts, most of which repeat the idea of hidden system files and how to reveal them as well as other frequently repeating solutions, all of which are helpful on the first view but time consuming to dig through. Clearly some people who have this problem just post a request while others do the right thing and search for similar posts first. The problem being that a search finds many duplicate solutions that need to be ignored to find any novel solutions that might apply. Some structure, maybe like a Wiki, that would allow a hierarchical approach to solving the problem (i.e. first try this, then if that doesn't work try this, etc.) could be invaluable and save on alot of repeat posts and fruitless searching for unique sources to frequently appearing issues.
Just a thought.
Thanks again for a great resource.
ed