Should people be required to either accept an answer or delete the question if it has been live for a certain period of time (say 1 month) without any traffic (i.e. comment or answer)?

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What problem does forcing an accept solve/address? –  Mat Dec 22 '12 at 12:14
Some questions are automatically deleted after 30 days; see Auto-deleting old, unanswered zero-score questions after a year? –  Arjan Dec 22 '12 at 12:37
People having a 0% accept rate –  Ed Heal Dec 22 '12 at 12:50
Again, how's that a problem? What would having everyone at 100% accept rate solve/improve? Having bad/wrong answers accepted because people are forced to sounds like a really bad idea. Questions that don't have an accepted answer don't hurt anything, votes rate the content. –  Mat Dec 22 '12 at 12:51
Closely related and just asked today: How should users handle unanswered questions? –  Tim Post Dec 22 '12 at 13:09
Some problems got.resolved after a few releases of library/framework, taking more than one year... –  Łukasz 웃 L ツ Dec 23 '12 at 13:15
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3 Answers

I disagree with this idea. We can't force OP to accept our/anyone's answer. It totally depends on OP whether to accept the answer or not. And why to delete a question if it is a real or a constructive question?

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How can a person maintain their accept rate then? –  Ed Heal Dec 22 '12 at 13:05
Why should we try to force everyone to have a high accept rate? If someone has a poor accept rate then I'd rather have that clearly visible than try to hide it by deleting their older posts. If everyone has a high accept rate all the time then it's not possible to distinguish between those who accept answers and those that don't. –  Mark Byers Dec 22 '12 at 13:10
This furthers my accept-rate-should-just-go-away stance even more. –  Tim Post Dec 22 '12 at 13:12
I second Tim on this. I'm really getting tired of people being badgered about their accept rate. In some cases, it's caused people to accept outright wrong answers just so they don't get yelled at by others. –  Brad Larson Dec 22 '12 at 16:18
@TinyTimPost <jk>You're just saying that because yours is so low?</jk> I guess one could make a case for keeping it as a private field in the profile. But it should definitely be removed from the public. –  Daniel Fischer Dec 22 '12 at 16:43
@TinyTimPost I've given it one last push... –  Bart Dec 23 '12 at 22:12
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No, this makes no sense. I've had a few questions receive an answer which doesn't actually answer the question correctly or for whatever other reason don't solve the problem.

Accepting that "answer" is actually worse than not accepting an answer.

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One question may answered again in the future, also existing answers can be reference to what they try to this question - and maybe some of them work even if they not have been accepted.

Also there is the case that many users hit one two questions, and then disappear from the site and not accept the answer that they have get.

I disagree also with this idea.

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