Should I be more patient with my open questions during the site's Beta phase?

Question

Since we have so few questions and so few visits per day, I'm reluctant to accept an answer for one of my questions. The answers are tied for votes and I'd really rather have more opinion from other gamers on the subject.

I think part of the issue is that game-specific questions (especially those about more obscure games) are less likely to have a great answer because only a fraction of the small community here will have played that game, and an even smaller fraction will feel like they can give a good answer based on their experience.

I think it would be bad to avoid accepting a good-to-great answer just for the sake of having more open questions. But is it acceptable (for now) to be slower to accept answers that have few upvotes or are in the okay-to-good range?

Answer 1

I've only asked one question so far, but I definitely left it open (no checkmark) far longer than I normally do on Stack Overflow. Accepting an answer usually has the effect of closing down a question unless someone has something profound to add. I think it's good for a young site such as this to not discourage new answers.

Answer 2

You are under no obligation to accept an answer. If you feel that none are suitable answers then definitely leave it open.

You may be right in that we don't yet have a large enough community to answer all questions about all games. You do have other options though.

• Offer a bounty on your question
• Rework your question to address the answers that have been given
• Comment on the answers that have been given showing how they do not address what you are trying to find.

There are several upvoted answers to your question so this will not show up as "Unanswered". I imagine this limits traffic to the question if there is no recent activity on the question. In order to get more eyeballs on it you will have to keep it active (in a productive way).

Answer 3

I know the feeling. I personally have started to leave such questions open but upvote helpful answers. Over on Gaming.SE I once accepted one of the answers and later found a far better one had been posted. Since that was several months ago I was unable to change the accepted answer.

So. If you're not truly satisfied with an answer - don't accept it.

Like Pat said, it won't hurt the site's statistics as long as there is at least one upvoted answer...