I use to see a lot of users asking question, and once someone ask it, just gone away from Stackoverflow, without accepting answer, so the question stay open...

This kind of question will stay open because it will never be accepted : asker has his answer, and don't care about finalizing the post.

Is there a way, like a kind of flag (4 moderators who vote to accept per exemple), to accept an answer and finalize the post process ?

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    Accepting is not closing. And no, accepting is totally up to the OP himself. And why should it be so important anyway? – juergen d Jul 5 '14 at 10:22
  • The accept mark is only meant to use for the OP; he/she doesn´t need to use it at all if none of the answer are satisfying personally etc. So that probably won´t happen. And don´t confuse open ith accepted. – deviantfan Jul 5 '14 at 10:23
  • Yes, excuse me, I say close(not good word), to just accept answer. Important (great word) : a lot of question stay without accepted answer but there is an answer.... – BENARD Patrick Jul 5 '14 at 10:25
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    @TheLittlePig: So, what is the problem with those questions? – juergen d Jul 5 '14 at 10:29
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    @juergend The problem is that because of the laziness of the person asking the question, they will be eternally marked unanswered, even though they are. This is especially problematic for beta sites where "unanswered questions" are a stain on the statistics which will delay graduation. – MrLore Jul 5 '14 at 16:42
  • @MrLore: In my ecperience those questions get accepted some day when the OP learns how the site works. But I am of course only speaking for Stack Overflow on which meta site we are right now. – juergen d Jul 5 '14 at 18:01
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    I'm not sure why this has been down voted so much... I had the exact same question. While a moderator may not be able to judge the quality of an answer (as @Shog9 answers), they can certainly judge if the OP has given sufficient feedback (or any at all) to those who are posting answers. I've seen a lot of posts where a good answer is given but the OP doesn't accept it, nor provide any feedback to why it might be insufficient. I think this behavior discourages the answering of questions, especially from new users with low rep who are posting on very niche topics that don't get many views – RTbecard Aug 7 '15 at 12:44
  • see also Unanswered Questions - inactive users – gnat Sep 12 '15 at 10:36
  • I agree with James. I see quite a few thread that has hundreds of upvotes to a particular answer, but OP has not accepted even one of them. It's like OP has vanished (probably dead idk). – GeneCode Jan 12 '17 at 8:44
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    @juergen re "In my experience those questions get accepted some day when the OP learns how the site". Not my experience at all. I think it would be fair in some unambiguous cases, like when OP says "thank you it totally answers my question!" then leaves and no new answer is added for 2 weeks. Users look for questions to answer and opening, reading, then realizing a perfect answer has already been given, makes everyone lose time and discourage users (me certainly) to dig in older questions yet to be answered. – Moody_Mudskipper May 22 '18 at 11:28
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    I like the idea of a flag. If 4 moderators decide cautiously it's worthy of being checked as accepted, I'm confident it is, and user could still have an option uncheck it, and then the moderators wouldn't have any power anymore. – Moody_Mudskipper May 22 '18 at 11:29

No. Because...

  • ...Accept means only one thing: this answer was helpful to the person who asked the question. Take that away, and there's no point to having it.
  • ...Moderators are ill-qualified to do this in many cases. Expecting a moderator (or even a group of moderators) to be able to decide that an answer is useful on topics or in situations where they've no experience is naive.
  • ...There are a lot of questions. There are only a few moderators. If this responsibility was pushed on them, we'd just see a lot of questions marked "answered" with irrelevant or lackluster answers. Not gonna name any names, but certain sites are rather infamous for this sort of behavior by moderators.

But most of all, because it is completely unnecessary. You can do this yourself: if you see a question with an answer you recognize as correct, then upvote that answer! The system will immediately consider it to be answered. That doesn't prevent someone from posting a better answer later on, or the asker from choosing to accept a different answer - but in lieu of anything else, it is the will of all those reading and voting that determine the top answer for a question, not some small cabal of mods.

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    The point of the site is to be helpful to as many people as possible, in the most generic way, the Accepted Answer being only used to mean that it satisfied the OP seems counter intuitive. Votes are used in that way, I guess. – TankorSmash Dec 23 '14 at 20:37
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    I've been on sites where "accepted" could mean anything; the asker found it useful, other readers found it useful, moderators thought it looked good, the system got tired of no one else accepting and automatically picked an answer out of the pile... In practice, this meant "accepted" didn't mean anything. – Shog9 Dec 23 '14 at 20:58
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    it looks worth referring to cross-site dupe at MSE: Would it be possible to have a “community accepted” feature? (status-declined) – gnat Dec 31 '14 at 10:05
  • @gnat, 41 upvotes for your linked question, and 11 downvotes for mine... The 2 questions are similary... – BENARD Patrick Jun 10 '15 at 20:43
  • Just curious if this is still the case or if the decision has changed in 2y and mods can now accept answers? (My issue being users who see my answer then stop using SO) – Myzifer Aug 30 '16 at 10:26
  • Mods cannot nor ever will be able to accept answers on behalf of other users, @myzifer. – Shog9 Aug 30 '16 at 19:44
  • I gathered that was the case and can understand the reasoning, I just hoped the decision had changed due to the main irritating reason I mentioned :( – Myzifer Aug 31 '16 at 8:31
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    Many times the user asking the question leaves a comment to the tune of, "Wow! thanks, that helped" or "Good eye, it works now", and then they disappear. Wouldn't that be enough grounds to mark the question as accepted. – Dov Benyomin Sohacheski May 24 '17 at 12:29
  • I disagree with every of those points, 1) in many cases (maybe most) new users are very happy to thank the author of the answer in comments, but for some reason won't check as answered. If moderators are asked to be conservative about it I think they will be virtually no subjectivity issue whatsoever, if it needs 3 or 4 flags there will be none at all. 2) They would not be ill qualified in cases where OP explicitly states that the question was answered. – Moody_Mudskipper May 22 '18 at 11:37
  • 3) I don't know why you imply moderators would do this job poorly, it's much easier than any other moderation tasks, and in my opinion it'd be one of the most importants. Less time loss for everyone, and better gratification for good answers. – Moody_Mudskipper May 22 '18 at 11:38
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    Because I've used systems where this was an option, and they were invariably misused, @Moody_Mudskipper. If the problem is askers not knowing how to accept answers, then the solution is a better UI, not a proxy. – Shog9 May 22 '18 at 16:42
  • @Shog9 why we don't have a status-completed tag, similar to that in the meta website. While searching unanswered question in a specific tag i always find that the answer was answered in the comments and the user i not logged in from many years. And no answers are provided at all. I don't think i should write others answer as mine in this situation as mentioned here meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1555/… – Hadi Feb 16 '19 at 10:05
  • Do you have any idea how many "completed" requests aren't marked as such here on meta, @Hadi? A few of us took a pass through the more active bugs a few weeks ago, marking the ones we could find - but a lot of 'em end up overlooked, or seen only by people who lack the skill or time to verify that they've been resolved. The advantage on main is that anyone with those skills can upvote a useful answer, dropping it out of the default unanswered lists - so take advantage of that power when you're able to. – Shog9 Feb 16 '19 at 16:14
  • @Shog9 what to do if a comment solved the issue and no answer was written. And the OP didn't logged in many years ago. – Hadi Feb 16 '19 at 16:17
  • You have a few options, but here's the usual advice @Hadi: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/117251/… – Shog9 Feb 16 '19 at 16:34

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