- Should users be asked to increase their accept rates?
- Should askers who never ‘accept’ answers be penalized in some way?
According to these posts and their answers, accepting an answer is the OP's role because he is the one who can decide if an answer has reached his standard.
However, I too have seen questions without accepted answers, with no apparent reason not to accept an answer.
This would be completely fine in the case of an ambiguous topic, or unsufficient answers, but there are cases where the post is left to rot without an accepted answer. Future users might feel unsure about a perfectly valid answer because it's not accepted, and could even ask the question again only to see their question marked as duplicate.
Upvoting a good answer may help, but sometimes the best answers are not the most popular, especially on old posts.
I think giving high-rep. users the ability to vote-accept an answer some time after the question was asked (something like a month) would help both the reputation system and clear the "Unanswered Questions" list of question that already have accurate answers and the future readers.
Of course, the OP would still be the strongest on that matter, and can decide to unaccept that answer and accept an other at his will.
What do you think ?
Edit : Thanks to Rathony's answer, I do see the negative sides of such change. Being able to tell the difference between the asker's choice (accept) and the community's choice (upvotes) is indeed important.
But when the asker is mute, I see no harm in the community being able to choose for him, as long as it seems to fit the problem.
As Andrew Leach said, restricting this ability to questions asked by users who might not have grasped the concept of accepting answers yet could be a good idea. Having less than 300 rep. in a month is a sign of being a drive-by single-issue user.
Also, I wrongfully used moderator while I wanted to mean high-rep. users, so I've edited that in the above title and texts (along with the formatting).
Edit 2 : I'm also talking about that kind of questions :