@MichaelGreen Great for Australia (for now!). However, if you believe that America or Britain will "stand by Austrralia" for a second longer than it suits them, I'd suggest that you take a gander at the current situation in Afghanistan. Also, take a look at Britain's "commitment" to its post-Brexit agreements with the EU and, in particular, my own country, Ireland...
It works out what it’s going to do using a bunch of operators. One does the update, but only once it has all the values it’s going to set everything to. So it doesn’t set ContactName and then figure out what it’s going to set City to, it works out that on the first row, it’s going to set ContactN...
@JohnK.N. Conversely, there are a lot of scenarios where the accepted answer worked great for the OP but are not the best answer for (any % of) other OPs. Neither acceptance nor upvotes implies (never mind guarantees) "best" or "right."
The feature change was precisely for the scenario where the OP selected an answer that either was not great at the time or has since been superseded by a better technique. I would bet that the majority of the cases where it makes a material difference are on older questions where the accept happened a long time ago, not last week.
There is no question, though, that putting the accepted answer at the top will be better in some cases, and the most up-voted answer will be better in others. There is also no question that we have no idea why a user might up-vote one answer more than another - there are so many factors, I find your insinuation that my answer got more up-votes simply because of my name a little insulting tbh.
It's like J.D. thinking I get away with spamming the site. /shrug
@AaronBertrand that wasn't my intention. My answer was after your's which resulted in more upvotes.
:-)
I have noticed over the years that upvotes on answers from well-known community members will attract more upvotes than valid answers from other members.
@JohnK.N. Yes, there is probably some truth to that, but I wouldn't infer that that's solely because they're well-known. As in, maybe they also have good answers.
I'm not suggesting my own answers, for example, are all worthy of all the up-votes they've received. But the opposite is also not true: that I could post the script of a lifetime movie and get more up-votes than a valid answer just because of my rep or my name or whatever. There is still going to be a very large portion of those votes that only happen when a quality bar is met.
The little bit you're talking about is like being confused about why Tom Brady gets more money for a commercial than Mark Sanchez. Again, not that I'm Tom Brady. I just don't see the subjective parts of voting as something that is a problem, never mind one that we can solve.
So it seems lime we are discussing the obvious. Answers are answers. Some people think answers with the mist upvotes should be at the top where they attract more attention
Others believe the accepted answer should stay at the top.
Right. Sometimes the best answer is the one the OP selected, sometimes it is not. Sometimes the best answer is the one the community up-voted the most, sometimes it is not. Sometimes it's both, sometimes it's neither. And like beauty that can change from reader to reader too, since nothing about "best" is objective in this context IMHO.
I don't know that there is an opportunity to disagree, really, unless you think there is never an occasion where the accepted answer is not the best answer. I don't think the existing behavior is perfect, and I also don't think the change is perfect, because there isn't one way to do it that fits all answers.
The way it's always been done in the past is that the OP obviously is the sole decider on which answer is best and works for them. Sometimes they're right about both, but sometimes they're only right about the latter. Plenty of cases where the OP took the easy or short or first answer.
The new behavior gives the community a little more say about which answer is best, while not taking away the asker's ability to indicate which answer worked for them.
Let me know why you think one of those behaviors is perfect for all answers all of the time.
Yeah it has worked out better in some cases. But can't be expected to be better in all cases.
I just don't think it's a problem space that can ever be perfectly solved.
It's like what is the right pizza.
Or the best fries.
And it's much harder to get community consensus on anything on a little site like ours, or even on some of the more niche tags on the main site. Here the inertia of early votes is unlikely to ever be overcome or counteracted.
