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I've seen a lot of questions with good solid answers that have been upvoted repeatedly (even questions where the asker has commented on an answer and basically said that it helped them solve their problem) but the asker never officially marks any answer as the one that helped them. Is there an approved way to let the asker know that they should do this?

Also as a personal curiosity, I was awarded a bounty yesterday but when you look at the question it doesn't appear to have been marked as having an answer. Is this the way questions work when there's a bounty attached to them or did the asker simply award me the bounty but fail to mark the answer as correct?

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    I believe the bounty goes to the highest upvoted answer automatically if no answer is selected by the user.
    – Bryan Denny Mod
    Commented Mar 23, 2011 at 15:30
  • @Bryan Denny - Yeah, after seven days it's supposed to award half of the bounty to the highest voted answer. But the asker gave me the full bounty without marking my answer as correct.
    – newuser
    Commented Mar 23, 2011 at 15:31
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    There have been several discussions about this at meta.stackoverflow.com. Let me see if I can find some and distill out the consensus.
    – ale Mod
    Commented Mar 23, 2011 at 15:48

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Consensus seems to be that there's only so much we can and should do for new users. An awful lot of the time they're just "drive-by" askers who will get their answer (perhaps) and be gone, never to contribute to the site. There's no point in spending so much time on them.

For myself, I just try to remind people who find their own answer to post it as such and "accept" it, so that other people with the same issue will see the solution.

I think occasionally reminding users that they should accept the answer that worked for them is okay. If you're seen as a person who does it habitually, however, people may start flagging your comments.

Here's some relevant links:

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    I would only remind users who have shown signs they are going to stick around. Reminding a drive-by user isn't useful.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Mar 24, 2011 at 10:09
  • @Jeff Thanks, I was going to ask about that as I'm sort of in that situation right now. Although I figure he'll get around to it sometime :)
    – Daniel
    Commented Mar 24, 2011 at 20:11

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