tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Make a "late" answer visible)

Ilya Nikokoshev comments on "Make a "late" answer visible" (1178)

2009-12-24T00:37:59-08:00

One thought I came up with is for an original asker to include a short summary of the answers into the questions. This should work when the answers complement each other; it also would make clear what parts of the question are still unanswered.

The disadvantage of the proposal is that it requires manual work from an asker or a 2k+ person and it may not work for all types of questions.

Scott Morrison comments on "Make a "late" answer visible" (1170)

2009-12-23T11:30:17-08:00

I'm not sure what you mean.

It's not that a "late answer" is "invisible", it's just hard to notice. Answering a question does push it to the top of the pile again at the homepage. The original asker will also get a notification next time they log in.

But generally, yes, it is a weakness of the Stackexchange software that later answers don't receive much attention. This is in part of result of design decisions made for Stackoverflow --- there's a much great sense that for programming questions prompt and early answers are more useful than later ones.

I'm having trouble imagining a mechanism to make later answers more visible, though. "Paying" the server some of your reputation, to keep the question high on the front page, until it's received a certain number of views???

Hans Stricker comments on "Make a "late" answer visible" (1169)

2009-12-23T10:02:22-08:00

How do one come to know of a "late" answer? How can one make one's late answers visible (= let others know, that one made a "late" answer?)