2 best answers ?

@Sinnbeck Yes I understand, I have had the same experience, that's sometimes disappointing.

@_adrian In that case, I want to suggest to have up/down votes and an option to sort answers according to them.

A lot of times I visit an old thread with a lot of replays without "Best Answer" one, instead of reading all replays I go visit StackOverflow instead. Answers here are more informative than StackOverflow if it's related to Laravel so I would like to have that option to make it easier for us to upvote answers for future users.

@_adrian Perhaps we could add a “Helpful answer” option that could be awarded to multiple answers in a thread and would give a rep count somewhere between 50 (like) and 500 (best answer), perhaps 200 points.

@_adrian the problem is that an answer often takes 10 replies or more to get it solved as people don't explain the full problem up front. Let me know if you want some examples

@kokoshneta My suggestion was to target abounded threads by authors. There are many threads that have been answered already but doesn't have Best Answer replay.

Having “Helpful answer” will not solve that issue if the OP abounded the thread.

@Sinnbeck Agreed.

Crazy idea:

What if all posts that doesn't have a best answer but a shitload of replies, generates a reminder to the user to give the best answer?

It would force some of the "lazy" to give a best reply.

It would be very annoying though.

@Tray2 That's right, something better could be to give the possibility to close a post without giving any best answer.

@vincent15000 Agreed, I hate when someone resurrects a thread that has finished pre-school.

So for example, in tackling the issue where an answer is given in multiple replies and someone comes along and summarises and gets best answer, how would OP be able to select only one of those replies and give highlight the entire solution since it's broken up into parts? Implementing an up/down system would probably take a lot of testing, still unsure it's the right way.

I am also considering the ability to close a thread once it's solved but what if a particular solution evolves in time and something better comes along 6 months later and someone wants to add to it? I've run across issues like this where one solution became outdated and someone came along and updated a year long thread.

Perhaps one idea would be to allow users to suggest a best answer, so more users could end up suggesting the same post and prompt the OP with a notification that "more people" think that that particular post is the best that way OP also gets notified and if he/she agree they can allow it and mark that post as Best.

@_adrian And if the post is closed, why not preventing from adding new comments ? Sure the answers can evolve, even several years after with new Laravel versions. ;)

Furthermore each developer has different knowledge so I think that it's not a good idea to let other developers give their own advice about the best answer because one answer can be the best for one dev and another one for another dev.

@_adrian IMHO, a Best Reply is the OP's "gift" to give based on their problem being solved. Sometimes I need to remind myself of this, especially in examples like @sinnbeck describes above :D - ultimately the role of the forum is to provide help to the OP, it is up the them to decide what helped

@tykus I agree ;).

@tykus yeah the helped part is what often gets me. If you spend an hour of your time debugging and they give themselves best answer, it's not about be helpful, but about being "right"

@Sinnbeck perhaps there should be a possibility to prevent an author to give himself the best answer

@vincent15000 I disagree with that. Sometimes the author comes with answer themselves and that should be the one that future users consider the "Best Answer"

@MohamedTammam That's effectively not false ... finally it could be possible to assign oneself the best answer ... but the problem is that several people assign themselves the best answer whereas they often should assign the best answer to one other.

@MohamedTammam agree. Best answer should be used to mark the solution. It just feels annoying sometimes. I am not saying I have a solution though

@vincent15000 Yeah, that what pushed me to like StackOverflow way for using up/down votes to let the community decides for future users.

@MohamedTammam I have seen the same thing go on there, where there will be a down vote but it's a real good answer.

One solution is just have [Solved] put in front of question.

Likewise I have seen many best answers here, where it's actually a wrong and insecure answer, but since it seems to work a new user will use the technique anyway and avoid the quality time to actually learn the correct way.

An example of this is setting up on hosting and moving index around which is wrong but if you search you will find many users do that anyway because it seems easy.

And I have seen the correct answer of pointing to public as the document root totally ignored.

@jlrdw @mohamedtammam So the right question is : what is a best answer ?

Is it the best answer to help to author of the post ?

Or is it the best answer from the point of view of the quality of the code ?

@vincent15000 For me it's both.

The one that's helped the author at the time of the questions, and also the updated answer in terms of quality, up-to-date, security etc.

@MohamedTammam Yes but in that case it cannot be the same best answer, as @sr57 suggested, it could be better to assign both a best answer and a most helpful one.

@sr57 Very good idea. To go further, why not have at the same time Most helpful (for the OP) and Best answer (for the quality of the code), and sure close a post without any most helpful or best answer.

@lancashireman That were my first suggestion, but it seems to not be a good idea.

@vincent15000 having multiple 'best' answers is indeed a terrible idea. You can't have two best answers to the same question. You have answers that are correct and you have answers that are incorrect.

@lancashireman True. But we should perhaps limit each thread to exactly one specific problem. Often threads are "find 50 things wrong with my code" ':)

@Sinnbeck +1 to this, I've seen it a lot, and the kind of questions where you need to develop something from scratch :)

@jaseofspades88 I have sen where two people may be answering at the same time, but same answer.

OP sees last answer first, gives best answer, yet the first answer was put there first. I agree with having only one best answer, but allow some "helpful" also, maybe 100 points for those.