These forums have a reputation system, where developers who ask questions can mark the best answer as the Solution. Unfortunately, the system is currently being undermined by a pattern where developers ask questions, get excellent solutions to their problem that respondents clearly put time and effort into to help them, and then they reply something along the lines of “Thanks for all the help” or “I’ve solved it myself” (by using all of the help they got), and mark their own reply as the Solution, inflating their own reputation and not rewarding anyone who helped them out.
For the Solutions reputation metric to be a meaningful measure of how much each user has helped others solve their problems, it should not be able to be manipulated in this manner. Even in the case where a poster did end up solving their own problem with no help, it makes no sense to allow this, since the point of the metric is about scoring your helpfulness to others.
Users should not be looking at a solution count to determine if someone should be messaged for help. I’ve never even heard of anyone going out for their way to DM a high solution count user anyway.
Maybe so, but the purpose of the stats and badges is only to show your level of contribution to the community. Whether that factors into anyone’s decision to reach out to you is sort of beside the point. When anyone can solve their own questions and like all their own posts, the stats are meaningless and not serving their intended purpose.
No, people should still be able to mark themselves as the solution, it just shouldnt count for anything.
And I dont think any of these people are doing it too inflate their numbers, most of them are just new members to the forum and dont have a good idea of how these sorta things should be dealt with.
If they really wanted to inflate their numbers they’d just make a new post, wait a minute, then set themselves as the solution.
tl;dr: It simply shouldnt add to your solutions if you set yourself as the solution.
This is a place to learn, not a place where anybody cares about solutions. If somebody had the same problem as you, would it be more convenient to:
A: Jump to the solution.
B: Read through the entire post where the creator may or may not have even acknowledged something as the actual solution.
Sometimes solutions given by others don’t fix the problem you’re facing. If you find a solution yourself you should absolutely be able to mark your own post as the solution.
How annoying is it when you click on a post with an issue you’re facing and all it says is “I found/fixed the issue!” as the last post? You can’t necrobump it to ask for the solution or make a duplicate post either, so asking for the solution is out of the question the most of the time unless you scroll for an hour and find a duplicate that didn’t get taken down.
Now what SHOULD happen is a rule stating that if you mark a post as a solution, it must actually have the solution. This would prevent people from just saying “I solved the problem.” and marking it as a solution.
That would actually be ideal, though perhaps a bit of work for someone to verify it. Maybe the solution would just get the benefit of the doubt unless a bunch of people flag as not being a solution?
Done and done. As you and FroDev pointed out, the real goal here–to prevent people boosting their own rep–does not require disallowing them from actually solving their own questions, just having it affect their rep. And I absolutely agree that it would be better for everyone if the marked Solutions actually contain the solutions!
I feel like the only type of people who care about this are also people who care about their solution count, lol. It’s not really a big deal. If it contributes to their own solution count then so what?
Edit: I’ll add that in all my time of using this devforum, which has been years, I’ve never taken a look at someones solution count and been like “huh, I wonder if that’s inflated due to them marking their own solutions?!” I’ve never looked at someone marking their own solution and thought it was a problem, unless it wasn’t actually the solution, which has nothing to do with it being self marked.
