Thanks for asking, as Alistair’s answer gave me some ways to improve our process with moderator tags, etc.
Our process is to reply with instructions on reporting a bug through our support portal (it’s preferred that the end user reports the bug, not staff, so they can be asked follow-up questions, etc). And we mark that as the answer.
From my POV, this is the right approach for a few reasons:
- Reporting - at some point you or your stakeholders are going to care very much about the % of questions answered. Questions like this do receive a definitive answer, even it’s not the ideal answer. And like Alistair said, best practice is to tag/track those and follow up with the new answer (you can mark a new reply as best) once the bug has been fixed.
- Trust and authority of the answer - Other users might see the reply about the bug and assume that there’s an open question as to whether it’s actually a bug or not and they might not notice that the reply came from staff, etc. Marking it as the answer provides some “weight” or definitive authority that it’s 1.) a bug, 2.) your company knows about it, and 3.) it will likely be fixed at some point
- The psychology of marked answers - you want users to see those green check marks. It’s a signal that “this place helps answer questions” that will make an impact on their adoption and engagement over time.
- Superusers and gamification - the psychology of answers comes in here too. If you want other community members helping answer open questions, keeping this off their list as a question to investigate will improve their experience. If the unanswered question feed doesn’t build trust (too many questions with answers that aren’t marked), they’ll stop using it. It can also reduce their motivation to try to solve open questions they see in the regular feed.
