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Bug #107810
Comment #8

Comment 8 for bug 107810

Revision history for this message

Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste) wrote on 2007-04-24:

Running the query https://devpad.canonical.com/~andrew/paste/fileMmcn0B.html on yesterday's database, I found out those very interesting numbers:

Out of 1262 questions that had a confirmed answer:
- 384 were confirmed using the 'This Solved my Problem' button (30%)
- 670 confirmed their own answer (53%)
- 208 used the link from the notification email to confirm the answer (16%)

So, we can say that nearly 50% (since some of the self-answers are legitimate) of users misuse/misunderstand the 'Best answer' feature. I can see two likely explanations for those numbers:

a) Users don't see/understand the 'This Solved my Problem' button.
b) Users know exactly what they are doing, and use the 'I Solved my Problem' hoping to get a karma bonus.

I think a) is a likely explanation because when users gets back to the question page, they want to provide feedback for the answer. So according to the 'do-it-now' principle, they'll jump right to the Message box because that's where they expect to provide the feedback.

If this is true, I don't think the checkbox design will be of any use, we'll just have as much self-answer by mistake (many people won't see the checkboxes, like they don't see the existing button.)

The question I ask myself is how come people use the main question link to provide feedback on the answer and do not not use the confirmation URL in the notification message. Is it because the first one is at the bottom of the email? Or is it because, they use the web interface to browse to the question (using the 'Created' or 'Need attention' report)?

Or we could allow rating individual answer. For example, in Jive, users can select two 'helpful' messages in addition to the 'this message solved my problem' award. The confirmation message would not select the best answer, this would be done separately.

Running the query https://devpad.canonical.com/~andrew/paste/fileMmcn0B.html on yesterday's database, I found out those very interesting numbers:

So, we can say that nearly 50% (since some of the self-answers are legitimate) of users misuse/misunderstand the 'Best answer' feature. I can see two likely explanations for those numbers:

a) Users don't see/understand the 'This Solved my Problem' button.
b) Users know exactly what they are doing, and use the 'I Solved my Problem' hoping to get a karma bonus.

If this is true, I don't think the checkbox design will be of any use, we'll just have as much self-answer by mistake (many people won't see the checkboxes, like they don't see the existing button.)

Maybe we should just remove the 'Best answer' selection and revert to automatic heuristic like we had before
 (use latest ANSWER), which altough not always correct, was probably correct more often that the current situation.
 
Or we could allow rating individual answer. For example, in Jive, users can select two 'helpful' messages in addition to the 'this message solved my problem' award. The confirmation message would not select the best answer, this would be done separately.