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Couple questions:

  • Do we know if users are actually implementing answers/solutions they receive on UXSE?
  • Do we know if the answer/solution actually worked for them?
  • Should the users who provided the solution receive more reputation?
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  • I think the closest we might get to this (at least on the very specific questions) is the accepted answer. I would love a way to follow up though. Perhaps we could have a 'vote for follow up' feature on questions with accepted answers that would ping the 'asker' for a quick update after a certain number of votes.
    – Andrew Shipe
    May 3, 2012 at 17:41

2 Answers 2

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We do (very) occasionally get updates on questions, such as with this question where the poster came back to update question with what they have actually done.

However it is a common problem with forums and Q&A sites - people come along with a problem, then once they've had the answer they don't return.

StackExchange implemented the 'Accepted Answer' option as a way to both show the rest of the community that the answer is worked or is correct, and this also serves as a reputation boost the answerer.

Don't forget: you can also hand out bounties to any answer you find worked particularly well, and leave a comment about why the answer was appropriate. However the basic structure of this site is that if an answer works then you mark it as 'accepted' as a way of indicating to everyone that this is the correct answer.

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  • Way to say the exact same thing I was saying with different words :P
    – Ben Brocka
    May 4, 2012 at 2:13
  • @BenBrocka In before you though ;)
    – JonW Mod
    May 9, 2012 at 9:00
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We really can't know, in the general case, what worked for them or what people ended up going with. Generally upvotes for useful to everyone answers are enough to encourage good answers, but the accepted answer is sometimes a good proxy of "I did/will do this". If you decide to go with a solution or actually implement it, by all means leave a comment or even give a bounty to the answer that solved your problem.

Saying "I did this and it worked" as a little comment update is something I'd like to see more of, here's an example of a post doing so: Where should the GUI light source come from? Not entirely sure I approve of it being added to the question body though.

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