policy for marking best answers when none selected?

Hi @SmartlyGreg!

This is an interesting topic and I’d love to hear about the practicies of other communities as well!

We are a telco and our community is B2C. Our community plays a role of an official customer service channel, so our standards for moderating and answering questions is pretty high. 

In order to raise the peer-to-peer answer rate, we try to give the community time to answer. In questions we’ve taken into use the “Is your problem solved” - email, in order to encourage community members to mark best answers themselves. Instructions here:

But the answer to your question: if a question has not been answered, we’ll mark the best answer after a few days 
 

Hi @SmartlyGreg, good question! Some thoughts from my side:

• the reason you want to mark the best answer is twofold: 1) to assure customers can easily find the right answer in the future (both on the community as via Google) 2) for tracking metrics on resolution times and % peer to peer
• you need confirmation that the reply is the right (and complete) answer, either because you know it yourself or the author acknowledges this (and ideally marks it him/herself:). So if you know it is the right answer, you can immediately mark it, if not you could verify it by replying to the author (incl ask him/her to mark it as answered.) The ability to do so of course does depend on your moderation capacity and community activity.

You can find some more background and process flows in our moderation training. 

Hope this helps! Haiko

Hmm… This is always a good puzzle to solve and I do have my thoughts as well.

Personally, as a forum volunteer I tend to be somewhat careful with how I use my global Best Answer rights. The most common reasons I’ll mark one myself tend to be for things like:

• Answers that have sat for a while and I’m highly confident about one of the comments being suitable, especially if Tim and Jess aren’t around (and even if they’re not my own). I’m less likely to mark my own answer though to avoid “marking my own homework”
• To scare off spammers or fake “Security Researchers” until Tim can deal with them properly - it can work fairly well if I’m tactical about it
• In unique edge case situations where I feel a getting a Best Answer assigned quickly is beneficial to the OP
• Abuse prevention - if I have reason to think someone else might abuse the Best Answer feature, I might drop a comment that answers the thread in the right way, then force it as a Best Answer so that at least something useful is up until Tim and Jess can either verify or replace it
• Emergencies - very rare that this ever comes up! But in an emergency I might claim a Best Answer as early as possible in a thread so that I can have “control” over it and provide relevant info to other members that’s highly visible. To date, I’ve only ever used this reason once and I hope I never have to do so again

It’s not very often that I do so anyway these days, I’ve learned to control myself and not push things too quickly! In actual fact, the reasons above (except the first one) are basically the only ones I’ll force a Best Answer on a thread more rapidly than usual.

At the moment however, I’m currently edging close to a leaderboard milestone on the OVO Forum, so I’ve taken the decision to hold back on using my powers and being more restrained than normal. I’d rather earn my points fair and square after all!

OVO doesn’t have the Best Answer reminders set up right now, but sometimes we might drop a manual reminder on a thread as an alternative. Perhaps I can also ask @timcavey to stop by, as he can explain his processes better than I ever can!

Some really good rationale outlined above, a good example of how nuanced community can be, @SmartlyGreg!

We’ve used to pretty aggressive with assigning best answers: if it was right, if it wasn’t a duplicate that we wanted to move, we would mark the answer and to hell with the OP, the P2P metric or anything else. 

But since meeting with other communtiy teams, we take a hybrid approach now. 

Our moderator has time in their calendar every week, to review topics that were posted in the previous period. If they come across a duplicate, they’ll merge it. If it’s a good, unique topic, they’ll optimise it and look for a best answer to be assigned. That means it’s had at least a week without any interference, and without a best answer being assigned, unless the OP or super user does it before. 

This has a few benefits: topics aren’t messed around with for the first week that they’re published. That gives the OP the ownership over the topic that they probably like, it gives members time to get involved in the thread, it allows the thread to develop organically in a potentially new direction to the first question. Then our mod has the option of stepping it and see’s how the topic can be improved for anyone who might find it later. That helps to ensure decent content performance scores, but not at the expense of P2P. 

Keen to hear if anyone can see any glaring holes in this approach, or alternatives :)

@Suvi Lehtovaara @HaikoK @Blastoise186 @timcavey really appreciate your input!
And I’m sure I’m not the only one wondering this will help!

I have written down some thoughts about this in this topic:

Funny enough, I just noticed that I actually did not cover the actual “when” in this topic in a very straightforward way. :/ But it also depends on the situation, I feel. The quick summary of this is:

• If you are absolutely sure that a reply will solve the issue, you can mark it as soon as you see it.
• Should you not be sure that it is the correct answer, ask the user if this has solved it. If there is no response in 2-3 days, you should still mark it as solved if the chance is high that it solved it.

Of course you also have the option to send an email notification to bump users to mark their question as solved. Here Community Managers set the email to be sent 2-5 days after the question has been created. I would recommend to keep that in mind and not mark solutions before such a notification would have been sent.