Politely requesting questioners accept a submitted answer (that they've indicated is correct)

Question

I'm fairly new around here, and read a Meta post from 2015 encouraging 'people to engage into solving some of our old unsolved problems.'

In an attempt to do just that, I've been poring over questions without accepted answers. Imagine my surprise when I discovered many that not only have answers, but have comments from the OP saying 'yes, that's the answer!' However, they never actually marked the answer as accepted.

Since it's annoying to read a question, start formulating an answer, and then discover that it has actually been answered, I've begun leaving comments such as the following:

@xxx: Can you accept yyy's answer below? To mark an answer as accepted, click on the check mark beside the answer to toggle it from greyed out to filled in. Thanks!

(I started adding the instruction line when a user responded to my comment, saying 'Yes, I accept the answer' without actually clicking the checkmark)

My question is threefold:

1. Is that an acceptable use of comments? I'm not trying to badger anybody, but they did ask the question, after all, AND indicate that a particular answer was accurate.
2. Is it worth it? I know many people post questions and then never return, but I'm only adding comments to ones that the OP has actually returned to to say 'yes,' which I believe would indicate they're more likely to respond.
3. Is there a better way?

Answer 1

First of all, it is generally discouraged to ask people to accept answers, be those your answers or anyone elses. If they think an answer is sufficient for acceptance, they will accept it. Sometimes users also just tend to give a question a little time before accepting the very first answer.

However, those as general remarks. You are adressing a much more specific issue here, namely that of users clearly indicating that an answer is correct without accepting it. (This also most of the time happens on ID questions, where the asker saying that an answer is correct is a 99% guarantee it should be accepted.) Most of those cases clearly result from people just not being aware of how the site works, specifically the acceptance feature, especially when they are new users. And whenever someone is unaware of how the site works, helping them and guiding them to understanding it is never a bad idea.

So to adress your specific questions:

1. Yes, if they really indicated that the answer is correct and the lack of acceptance just seems to come from a lack of knowing how the site works, such a comment is totally acceptable. However, as pointed out in the comments, it might be better to word it a little less demanding, leaving the option up to them. I for myself thend to leave a comment like this in such situations:

   Feel free to accept this answer if it is the correct solution to your problem.

2. Unfortunately, most of those comments will likely stay unheeded or even unnoticed. So it depends on your own priorities if you think it worthwhile or not. However, I have seen answers accepted after leaving such comments, even if its unclear if the comment helped in that. But there is certainly no disadvantage to leaving such a comment other than the time it takes you to write it.

3. Unfortunately, there isn't any more effective way to deal with this either. Neither can we nor should we accept answers on other users' behalf and if a user disappears forever, that's just bad luck. But at the end of the day, acceptance doesn't really mean that much, especially on a site like ours where many questions might not even be exactly solvable. I do agree that ID questions are a bit of a special case in this, especially since the lack of acceptance might encourage people to post new (and ultimately wrong) answers, but that's just a side effect we have to deal with.