Internally, we've been discussing how we can deal with obsolete or out-of-date answers. A few weeks ago, I requested some feedback on how to encourage edits to these types of answers, while I'm still wading through everything on that post but now I'm focusing my attention on the problem of negatively scored accepted answers.
There are three sorting options to display answers on a question:
- active – based on last activity/edit
- oldest – based on date posted
- votes – score based
In each of these options the accepted answer is pinned to the top of the sorting order, unless it’s a self-answer by the OP. The "pinning" also applies to negatively scored answers. No matter which sorting option is selected by a user the accepted answer appears at the top. If you have the same question and the accepted answer is negatively scored, you’ll end up with a view like this:
Over the years, there have been many requests to change the behavior of these types of answers:
- Can we exempt downvoted accepted answers from getting the top spot?
- Keeping special status for Accepted Answers without sticking them to top forever?
- Why are negative score accepted answers still at the top?
- Don't put heavily downvoted accepted answers at the top
Well, I think it might be time to implement a change to some of these negatively-scored accepted answers.
Proposed Solution
- An accepted answer will no longer be pinned to the top spot if it is negatively scored and has hit the threshold to get the lightened greyish color (e.g., ≤ −3 on Stack Overflow)
- When the accepted answer is unpinned, it will be sorted naturally based on the sort order selected by the user (active, oldest, votes)
- If an accepted answer accumulates upvotes and gets ungreyed, it will take the top, “pinned” spot again
Here are a few numbers of the questions that would be impacted by this change.
+----------------+------------------------------+------------------------------------+
| Site Name | Questions w/ Accepted Answer | Questions w/ <=-3 & Another Higher |
| | <=- 3 | Scoring Other Answer |
+----------------+------------------------------+------------------------------------+
| Stack Overflow | 1097 | 897 |
| Mathematics | 17 | 12 |
| Super User | 14 | 9 |
| ELU | 20 | 13 |
| Server Fault | 14 | 11 |
| SO in Russian | 11 | 7 |
| Physics | 14 | 11 |
| Gaming | 10 | 8 |
+----------------+------------------------------+------------------------------------+
Currently on Stack Overflow, there are 1097 questions that have an answer that is ≤ −3. Of these 897 questions have another answer that is scored higher, so these accepted answers would no longer be pinned to the top spot in the default view (votes). Additionally, they would not appear before newly- posted or updated answers in the "active" sort, which might aid somewhat in giving attention to answers that have been created or edited specifically to address problems with the accepted answer.
While this doesn't handle all negatively scored accepted answers, it's a start to get the eyesore of heavily downvoted stuff out of the way for other answers.
