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As a Moderator, you should make sure that the rate of "unanswered questions " (so questions without a marked solution) stays as low as possible. Users often forget to mark a reply as the best answer - maybe they did not know that they can, or the simply did not come back to the community.





There are some situations where we recommend to go ahead and mark the correct answer for a user. You should always be sure that a reply is in fact the correct answer to the question. If that is not given, you can still "bump" the user by adding a comment, asking if a reply has answered the question. Should that not happen, you can still decide to mark a reply as the valid answer.





Converting questions to a discussion


Maybe there is not a single, valid answer to a question? Sometimes people start a topic as question, but it actually is a discussion topic. In that case you can convert a question into a discussion topic. You can find the option in the top right corner in the topic view (in the Control environment):








I cannot mark a valid answer, why?


Often users post a question, but choose the topic type "discussion". In this case you need to convert the discussion to a question first. Use the same option as described above. After that, a reply can be marked as the answer.





Note: Only one answer can be marked as the valid solution. If there is a second, different question within a topic, then maybe it is better to move that question and create a new topic with it. This way your users will have it easier to find the right information.
Hi Julian,





Thank you for the very helpful topic.


I have one additional question about the best answer option: is it true that the person who asked the question will only receive an notification e-mail about an answered question if the aswer is marked as the best answer?
Hi,





great to hear that it helped you!





I am not sure if I understand the question correctly, we usually use "reply" for a new comment, and "answer" for a reply which has been marked as a solution.





The system will always send an email if there is a new reply or if something has been marked as answered. The email will be sent to everyone who has been active in that topic (or subscribed manually by clicking on the star icon), however only if the user is "up-to-date". With that I mean that the user has read / opened the topic before an action (reply/marked as answered) has been made.





So if a user would ignore the notification about a new reply, the system will not send another notification about the topic being marked as answered.





We noticed this and we have the intention to improve this, in a way that the "topic has been marked as answered" email will be sent in every case.





Hope that helped,





Julian
Hi @Julian





Do you have any suggestions, how to encourage the community to mark answer? 🙂





Thanks in advance!
Hi Kasper,





very good question! 🙂 There are a number of things you can do:





1. Improve the email notification


I would improve the notification for new replies, so that you ask users to mark the solution in case this comment answered the question. Something like this:





Dear user,





user x has replied in the topic "xxx". Check it out here.





Did this comment answer your question? Don't forget to mark it as the correct answer, so that others can find it easier.





To do this, here some more info (but don't hesitate to ask for help!):


How to improve an email notification (tutorial)


Some inspiration for notification mail improvements





2. Update your Signature


I would update my signature, so that it says something like this:





Did you like this post? Give it a like! Did it answer your question? Mark it as the correct answer!





This helps to remind users of this feature.





3. Inform your Super users to remind users


Communicate to your most active users that they should remind users to mark it as the solution, once the user indicates that their question has been answered. It is in their best interest:





If something is marked as answered, users will find their answer quicker. Also, it will happen less often that users asked the same question over and over, which makes it easier for Super users to focus on new questions.





4. Respond to users to confirm a solution


I think the most common case is that users read your reply and simply forget to push this button. If you are not sure if a comment has answered the question, just leave a quick reply in which you ask the user to mark it as solved. Often enough they will do this (and learn it for the next time).





I hope that this helps! If someone else has a suggestion which is not covered in this list, I would be very interested to hear it! :)





Cheers,





Julian
Hi @Julian





Thank you so much! 🙂 Definitely something we can use.

Reply


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