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Stack Overflow has changed the way the answers are sorted:

We no longer pin the accepted answer (with the green checkmark) to the top of the list of answers. By default, we now sort strictly by votes (descending order by highest score), and the accepted answer's order in the list is based on its score.

There is a question now on Meta Stack Exchange if we would like to have the accepted answer unpinned on our site:

We can change the way the engine sorts answers in site settings. We would like to hear from you all if it is something you want to see on your site. [...] We are going to collect feedback before the end of September 19th.

I am posting this question here to discuss what would work best for our site Seasoned Advice.

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    For those who are not accustomed how this type of Meta question works: Community members should post answers for or against - it is also OK to have multiple answers for one side if there are different argument lines, for example - and when some time has passed and there have been votes, the decision is made for the side which has more votes. I had mistakenly stated here that there is no deadline; the Community mods have asked for us to have decided by Sep19th, I asked for an extension.
    – rumtscho Mod
    Sep 19, 2021 at 8:43
  • They also need to make it so the sort order on the questions isn't sticky -- took me months to realize I had somehow clicked 'active', as I wondered why the answers were being shown in a seemingly random order
    – Joe
    Sep 20, 2021 at 15:50
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    Would there be a way to autogenerate a sample of questions where the highest-rated answer is not the accepted one, to see what the typical effect would be here?
    – dbmag9
    Sep 28, 2021 at 13:14
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    @dbmag9 will add a data explorer query later. Good point.
    – Stephie Mod
    Sep 28, 2021 at 13:16

1 Answer 1

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I'm for this change -- I've seen quite a few answers on here that are twice as highly rated as the 'accepted' answer, often because the 'accepted' answer lacks an important warning or other caveat.

(I'm also against 'accepting' answers too quickly, as how do you know it works until you've had a chance to test it? It seemed like another case of antics like the AttilaNYC incident)

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  • What's the AttilaNYC incident? Oct 3, 2021 at 22:34
  • @user1271772 when the site was new, he went and asked lots of questions with a huge range of skill levels (from really basic newbie level to high-end expensive ingredients), but his comments seemed to suggest that he wanted specific answers, like he knew more than the question suggested. He was plagiarizing questions from some other QA site. And he wasn’t some random person, he was an employee of StackExchange.
    – Joe
    Oct 3, 2021 at 22:46
  • AttilaNYC was an employee of SE? Oct 3, 2021 at 22:47
  • @user1271772 yes. Here’s the initial reckoning: cooking.meta.stackexchange.com/q/757/67 . I’m on a phone right now so it doesn’t show if there are other discussions linked to that
    – Joe
    Oct 4, 2021 at 0:09
  • @user1271772 : I couldn't find any questions here on meta, but if you look at his profile via the Wayback Machine, it says he was a "Sales Manager" : web.archive.org/web/20100913055834/http://…
    – Joe
    Oct 4, 2021 at 17:28

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