Best Answer

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Original post by Mr Tyro I was woundering If like in the begginers forum and some of the other forums we could have something like a best answer like on yahoo asnwers.

Is the purpose of the For Beginners forum identical to sites like Yahoo! Answers or Experts Exchange? The GameDev forums are discussion boards, not get-immediate-and-detailed-answers-to-your-question boards. This is the first problem.

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It would help some people alot. Say you were searching for a question someone asked and you find it but you need the answer. Sometimes you need to jump through some post to find a good answer. Sometimes the other post are not on topic or don't realy answer the question or are complete inaccurate.

Sometimes a question is asked and a technically correct answer is given, however a follow up post proceeds to examine the question itself and provides much more illumination. This would deprive both original and repeat/return/echo askers of that sort of unexpected knowledge transfer. If an answer has been selected as "Best" or the thread marked as "Answered," people won't feel motivated to continue to read or post to it.

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The original poster or the people who visit the thread could vote on an answer that was very good and answerd the question nicely.

The original poster, especially in For Beginners, is very often insufficiently knowledgeable/skilled/equipped to tell a correct answer from a wrong one. The classic example here is when a beginner asks, "When I build my program in Visual C++ (or Dev-C++), it flashes briefly and then closes - I never see the output. How do I fix this?" Someone will invariably say "Put system("PAUSE"); at the end of your program." This will eliminate the symptom/behavior observed, thus seeming correct, particular to the beginner, but this answer is wrong.

(As an exercise, I leave it to you to search For Beginners to figure out why it's wrong. You will note that in every single instance that this is explained, it is as a correction to a wrong "right" answer.)

The downsides outweigh the advantages. Besides, why must you obtain an answer immediately? In the process of sifting through information while looking for something specific, you will often come across many other things you never knew that prove very valuable. Your suggestion would put an end to that, and I think that's a great disservice to everyone.

I see the problem with this now
especially the beginner part were they would not know if it was a good answer or not becasue they are just starting out. Your right that people will not be motivated to read or post in the thread that has a best answer. Sometimes after someone has answerd the question someone might elaberate on that and if the thread has a best answer they might not want to read on.

Thanks for clearning that up


The downsides outweigh do the advantages