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Possible Duplicate:
Allow asker to upgrade comment to answer

In the Q&As

  1. How to work around Entity Framework date time type bug?

  2. Facebook SDK C# - get friends list

  3. IE8 breaks when using two selectors?

the OP finds his solution in a comment and asks it become an answer.

A possible reason is the accept rate issue.

So these comments should become an answer by the user who owns comment?

What are the criteria for converting a solution comment to an answer?

EDIT: I think criteria is not the right word but instead common behavior:

What is common behavior for converting a solution comment as answer?

Making a comment to an answer is extra work which brings, accept rate for OP and some reputation to the user who answered?

What are the other useful and useless sides?

Note 1: From my point, these two Q&A are the first time I have seen this issue at Stack Overflow. Then in the second Q&A, I tried to make an answer extract from the reference link by adding more code.

Note 2: My English does not work sometimes, sorry for that, I mean this

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marked as duplicate by Anna Lear Dec 31 '11 at 23:16

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.

    
This doesn't happen automatically; the person has to do it themselves. Sometimes people stumble across the answer while asking for details in comments. –  Andrew Barber Dec 30 '11 at 21:09
1  
There is no defined criteria and there is no documented mechanism. If the OP finds the comment useful as an answer in and of itself, he is free to ask the user to post it as an answer and/or simply post it himself. A recent question along these same lines: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/117374/… –  Anthony Pegram Dec 30 '11 at 21:10
    
In your second example, it should be noted that a link to another answer is not an answer in itself. –  Purag Dec 30 '11 at 21:11
    
@moguzalp: You're not being very clear. If something that was posted in the comments solved the problem, the OP is free to ask the user to post it as an answer. The user has the choice whether or not to actually post the answer (it all depends on whether the suggestion was to visit another answer, for example, in which case you could flag/vote-to-close it as a duplicate since it helped him solve his problem, or whether it was a genuine suggestion that the user might not have seen fit as its own answer). –  Purag Dec 30 '11 at 21:18

1 Answer 1

There is no explicit documentation about when it is appropriate to convert a comment to an answer, as it generally just goes by whatever may be appropriate in the circumstances of that post.

If a user posted a helpful link to another question/answer and the OP solved his problem through the link (and then asked the user to make it into an answer so he could accept it), then it is absolutely not appropriate to post it as an answer. A link to another source is not an answer unless you provide some backing to the link, and if the link was to a question on Stack Overflow then the question in question (pun intended) should be flagged/VtC'd as a duplicate.

If a user posted a genuine suggestion in the comments (this recent one is a good example, but the user wasn't asked to write an answer), then it would be appropriate to make that into an answer, as long as it solved the OP's problem (but the question should be why it wasn't an answer to begin with).

As for your examples:

  1. The first one isn't really a case where an answer is given in the comments, whether directly or indirectly (indirect could be a link), so it technically wouldn't be appropriate in its current phrasing, since it's in the form of a question. If the user reworded it to suggest what they were asking about in the comments, then it would definitely be appropriate as an answer.

  2. Your second example would not be appropriate as an answer because all you did was post a link to another answer. If that answer solved the user's problem, then, like I said above, it should be flagged or vote to be closed as an exact duplicate. You should clarify that for the user in the comments.

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