Forum:Meta: Should accepting your own answers multiple times get you points each time?

Question

[Ram]

Currently, the BioStars system works so that accepting/bookmarking your own answer does not add to your points. However, it does award you the Scholar trophy for creating an answer that has been accepted. This trophy adds to your points.

Should this be how it works? While there is a case to be made that you might legitimately find the answer and accept it, there are cases where this results in scores being way more than what they should be.

Should we make this a one-time trophy instead? Or maybe add a trophy to tackle self-accepts and make that one time, routing all self-accepts to that trophy instead? Which of these is more practical/makes more sense to the community?

If the community likes this, I can raise an issue on GitHub and look at working on this feature.

[Istvan Albert]

The trophies award points for "fun" factor mainly. It is nice to be appreciated in different ways. But it is true that these can be gamed. Now protecting this on all sides makes life a lot more complicated from the coding perspective. Features and protections don't come for free. Every single feature is a liability later when it needs to be maintained. Yes one should not get points for self accepting answers, but then perhaps it is more about making it easy to mine this data and find out who (if anyone) does that. I think it would be funny to find someone that tries to embellish their credentials this way - it is almost like a social experiment.

I will say also that one of the reasons that promotion to moderators is not automated (for example say based on reputation) is take out the incentive to game the system.

[Ram]

I understand that implementing and maintaining features is a huge effort, and the return of investment in this case is minimal. Is there any way of addressing someone we suspect of gaming the system? Reinstate as new user by an admin maybe?

[Istvan Albert]

We have to be careful and err on the side of caution. Something that looks like gaming the system may just be someone trying to be helpful. But there are clear cut cases:

1. User asks question, does the research, later comes back answers and accepts their own question. Oh I would like if everyone did that ... ;-)
2. On the other hand: Posts pseudo-question, quickly answers some nonsense and accepts answer - that is a suspension and maybe even a ban IMHO. No different than spamming.

[Ram]

Third category: User asks question, gets answers, answers own question and accepts it. I think we should look at this case by case.

[cbio]

I feel like I know someone who falls into this third category.

Answer 1

[John]

Personally, I don't think that bookmarking should result in points ever. Bookmarking, in my mind, would happen irrespective to quality. I occasionally bookmark question/answers that I find funny, illustrative of some sort of common beginner/bioinformatics mistake/issue, or where the bulk of the discussion is going on in the comments and I haven't posted anything (and therefore I bookmark to follow it).

Conversely, I feel that if you do answer your own question, and accept it, you should get a point. Otherwise we do not encourage people to post their findings if they figure something out, since there's no points in doing so. Liking your own post is one thing - but your own post being the best answer is another. I can't imagine anyone is going to try and game the system by starting and answering 100s of threads :P It would be rather obvious...

Also, I didn't know trophies awarded points. I find that weird. I look at my score and think score/10 = Thank_You's. Now I'm worried I'm just heavily bookmarked for making rookie mistakes ;-)

[Istvan Albert]

I have come to see bookmarking as one of the most important indicators of value (view counts also work surprisingly well). They both might work better than voting. Someone wants to come back to this post later. So don't feel bad about getting bookmarked, its gold John, pure gold ;-)

[GouthamAtla]

But this could also be misused knowingly or unknowingly. For example: Differential expressed genes in cuffdiff

Answer 2

[Chris Miller]

The point of accepting an answer is to make sure that the next person who stumbles across it can get the right solution easily. If you provide that info on your own question after doing a bunch more research, then good for you. I'm all for rewarding people for taking the time to share their own answers back to the community.

If we had people asking stupid questions, then immediately answering them to try to shoot up the leaderboard, that'd be a problem. I don't see any evidence of that, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm not concerned.

[Chris Miller]

(thinking of bookmarking this comment just for irony's sake)

[Ram]

Well, you know what they say - write code for 6-months-later you. I look at my answers from 6 months ago and wonder who that guy was.

[John]

https://xkcd.com/979/ :)