why splunk community people not voting and not accepting answer to appreciate

[logloganathan]

Splunk community not voting and not accepting answer

there are lot of people spending time for questions by answer but it look like..no one giving respect to the person who answering the questions.

[niketn]

@logloganathan, I have been active on Splunk Answers for more than 1.5 years now. Out of my experience I can add few of my personal opinions about Splunk Answers Community:

1) The contributors/experts on Answers Community are very much passionate and spirited people, with Splunk running so much in their blood that they assist folks out of their own interest. For most Splunkers, posting answers allows them to suggest tips/best practices, workaround to issues, multiple solutions to same problem and above all learn cool new stuff everyday. Earning "karma" points for the same is mostly secondary.

2) Most of the folks join Splunk Answers only for posting their issues and become dormant after finding the solution for their answers. If such folks do not remain active for long and experience the positive vibe and culture here they treat Splunk Answers as site like ask.com where Splunk related question will provide them with answer and they move on. Even worse is scenario where folks treat it as stackoverflow.com where they search through older posts and practice their downvote privilege on older posts which may not be relevant anymore due to architecture/technical changes, referred link or documentation changes etc.

3) Splunk Answers Community moderators and even contributors who answered a question do follow up with the poster weekly once or twice. But most of the time correct answers are Accepted only by the poster not the answers moderators, where they review the question with best possible answers and mark the same as Answered.

4) Correct Answers (many a time multiple of these) can always be up voted and as far as I know folks do practice this on Splunk Answers (not for every single answer though). I personally Up Vote an answer under following circumstances:
a) When the answer is really mind blowing and teaches me something new.
b) If it addresses an issue that I am also facing.
c) When I feel answer caters to poster needs and I want to support the contributor with further best practices/slight correction to their answer. I do this instead of writing a new answer as there is no need to repeat the same answer twice.

5) While posting I practice following couple of things:
a) Post a comment to question if I have further clarification required in order to answer the question. When I am not too sure of the answer and want the question to flag as unanswered for other Splunkers to weigh-in or post their answer instead.
b) Post a new answer for the question already answered, to document a different approach (which is mostly to perform better as compared to previous answer or accepted answer).

Read Splunk Answers Community Guidelines:
https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunkbase/splunkbase/Answers/Questions
https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunkbase/splunkbase/Answers/Splunkcommunityguidelines

[dharveynswccd]

Here's my honest answer: It is just as @logloganathan suggested. I get excited about finding a solution and I'm off to my environment to continue splunk'ing. Starting today, I will endeavor to vote and pay homage to the valuable pro bono work being done here. You fellas are awesome at this stuff.

[maciep]

I know when I first started out here, I had never used a forum like this. I didn't realize that answers were just for answers and would post my comments as answers. I didn't know that I was supposed to accept an answer and so I think would just upvote them. I really didn't get it. I came from communities like myitforum, where the concept was just long threads.

And since there is no "sticky" out here that tells new users what they're supposed to do, I think there's a learning curve. I also agree with others that some users are just so excited they got a solution, they're off to their environments to continuing splunk'ing.

I also guess that some users may be embarrassed/surprised that somebody was able to answer their question, so they abandon it. And probably others still that maybe don't have notifications set up and don't realize that somebody answered their question, so it looks like it was abandoned.

I don't think having questions unanswered is all that detrimental to the community. Most people don't come out here and then search questions. Most google their splunk problem and land up here (multiple times, on multiple answers). It's the content that I think is helpful, regardless of whether the answer is "complete".

So I'm not helping because I don't press the issue. I'm here to help others because I think that's one of the great things about Splunk. And I'm also here to learn. I tell new splunkers to come out here to see if they can answer questions, because it forces you to learn more about Splunk. Karma is cool, but not my main motivator. I feel very few uses are being malicious in their (lack of) actions out here and try to give them all the benefit of the doubt.

[skoelpin]

I agree with most of what you said except for abandoned questions not being detrimental to the community. The way I search is by going to google and appending site:answers.splunk.com to my question so it only shows posts from Answers. I then open several tabs that may be relavent to my question and scan through them quickly to see if they've been accepted. I always read the accepted answers over the upvoted unaccepted answers because it gives validity that it solved OP's problem.

[maciep]

yep, I get that. But I typically read all answers, because I've definitely found instances where the accepted answer doesn't answer my question but one of the other answers does. And have come across posts with no accepted answers but still find my answer in there.

But you're right, the accepted answer is often the one I'm looking for. And those without accepted answers probably have at one that should have been. So if everyone did the right thing out here, then it would make this a better community.

[Moreilly97]

It's most likely that the user is happy to have a solution that they immediately continue working on their query, and because theres no need for the answer anymore they just close the page.
Although they make finding solutions to already asked questions more difficult , I can understand why they do it, so I cant be too mad at them!

[gjanders]

I think it's a combination of laziness (someone who does not bother to click the accept button) and a lack of understanding around upvoting/karma points and accepting the answers if they work!

The lack of accepting of answers make the website more difficult to browse and unfortunately there is no system that auto-closes or auto-prompts the asker of the question if they want to accept the answer or keep waiting...(I've seen moderators manually do this but it would be nice if that was an automated feature).

Finally sometimes an answer is in the comments of the question but not an "answer" and this often requires manual prompting by a member of the forum before someone actually closes the question with a valid answer...
Note that I sometimes answer in comments if I'm unsure if I have a valid answer, but I do move my comment to an answer if they advise it worked...

[tiagofbmm · Accepted solution]

It feels that people get so excited by continuing their work after getting the answer, that they forget this is not the Users paid job but a pro-bono one.

[skoelpin]

It happens ALL THE TIME and is very frustrating.. I had a guy last week tell me he wasn't going to accept the answer and "just let the community vote on it", even though it solved his problem

[ddrillic]

It's just because the forum is too good and people expect perfection and immediate answer. And even when perfection is presented they feel entitled - weird.