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While I haven't been very vigilant in enforcing it, pretty much since the beginning Stack Overflow has had a policy against using SOLVED in question titles. There has been a previous discussion of this on our own meta:

Should the headline marked with [Solved]?

I mention this because I noticed one of our more experienced members edited a Community bumped question which had been dormant for five months simply to put SOLVED in the title, although this member was not otherwise involved in the Q&A and did nothing further in the edit.

A few reasons I can see for this, all invalid:

  1. Because you think this is how questions with an acceptable answer should be dealt with -- no, please take the tour to understand better how the site works.

  2. Because you are trying to alert the user that there is an acceptable answer, or, as in this case, that they should probably accept their own existing answer -- no, if this is the case, leave a comment.

  3. Because you think there is a useful, acceptable answer and you want people who see it in a search list to know that -- no, instead:

    • Invite the OP to accept the answer with a comment.
    • Upvote the answer, which will increase its ranking in search results.

    Of course, if you don't think the answer is worth an upvote, then smacking "SOLVED" in the title is a confusing gesture.

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  • The existing policy is obviously not working. If a user hasn't seen seen in years then leaving a comment is futile! In line with my TQM training when what you are doing doesn't work try anything else. New users see the "Active" questions, most of which are poor abandoned questions. Ideally they would be deleted.
    – Milliways
    Commented Jun 14 at 7:23
  • I think closing them (which is what I did w/ the one in question here) works well enough for the purpose of letting people know not to bother reading. I have been trying to do more of that with the "community bumped" stuff and as per that linked recent post encourage others to do too. Some of them are problematic though -- if the question is reasonable and on-topic enough but unlikely to ever receive a decent answer because it is about something sufficiently obscure.
    – goldilocks Mod
    Commented Jun 16 at 13:49
  • The flip side of that though is many of these do have decent answers that have just never been accepted or upvoted; as per this, the bumped questions are "Questions with at least 30 days of no activity, at least one answer scoring zero, and no answers scoring above that"...
    – goldilocks Mod
    Commented Jun 16 at 14:04
  • ...So while it takes five sufficiently privileged users to close a question, it only takes one to upvote an answer, and either will put them out of future "bumped" eligibility. As I have tried to point out before, the upvote tooltip is "this answer is useful", not "this answer is personally useful to me", or "this answer is a work of art", etc.
    – goldilocks Mod
    Commented Jun 16 at 14:04

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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This site is full of abandoned questions.

Some of these are noted by the OP as solved either in Comments or Answers BUT not accepted.

What value is there in having them resurrected every few months - often dozens of times.

The official policy is unworkable on this site - many users only come here with a single question then are never seen again so they clog up the site.

Most are marked for closure, but there are too few active members to actually close them.

At least marking as SOLVED means those who look at the questions don't have to bother reading to see if there is ACTUALLY a question.

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    Well "many users only come here with a single question then are never seen again so they clog up the site" is not really a problem. It is perfectly possible and doable to come here and ask a single question, because it is what you need (even more when it is a valid and useful question), and leave. Continuity is not a necessity, unless you WANT to stay.
    – user146487
    Commented Jun 12 at 18:06

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