I looked in the FAQs section and searched, but maybe I'm missing it.
I've noticed a lot of questions that have great answers that have been voted up 5-20 times for the answer, but the original questioner has never accepted an answer in the question.
Does this just remain this way or is there an automated process to eventually auto-select the answer with the most up votes?
Or does an accepted answer really not matter overall?
Added tag per request and checked community wiki.
As folks have said, there's no process to auto-accept an answer to a "normal" question. There do exist, though, "above-normal" questions that have a reputation bounty offered on them. These questions DO get accepted automatically after 7 days if the asker does not accept an answer him/herself. The top-voted answer will receive the acceptance and thus the bounty.
I'm not sure where we add feature requests, but it would be nice if moderators could accept an answer (or someone with a certain amount of reputation).
There are many cases were a question has been obviously answer, but the OP hasn't returned. Other times the highest voted answer is good enough for the community.
Another suggestion would be multiple accepted answers.
It's up whoever posted the question to accept an answer. Answers are not automatically accepted regardless of how many up votes they get.
An answer may be very popular and technically correct without actually answering the posters actual question - i.e. it is not helpful to the poster. This can happen for a variety of reasons but the poster is ultimately responsible for marking the answer as accepted.
It's been proposed any number of times to allow moderators to accept an answer on behalf of a user. This has also been shot down the same number of times.
The rationale is that accepting an answer is meant to indicate which answer was most useful to the person asking the question, while community consensus as to the "best" answer is expressed through votes.
Thus it can happen that the accepted answer isn't the highest rated answer, or even is voted below zero.
It doesn't really matter much that a question doesn't have an accepted answer; so long as it has at least one upvoted answer it will not count as an unanswered question.
I have come accross some instances of this:
In situations like that, I'm currently "quoting" the comments that solved the issue and posting them as "answer". This will give myself rep however, and not the original answerer, but I still believe this increases the quality of the whole post (answers should not be burried in comments!)
I would like to be able to convert a comment to an answer, and then be able to accept this on behalf of the OP, I think it would increase the quality of the site.
This could even be done using the familiar voting system we have today.
Vote for "This is the answer" -> Reason: "OP states this answer answered his question as a comment".
Also, we could only allow this after a certain period of time, e.g. a wait period of 1 Month.
