Community mod marked another SAS employee's response as Solution without my knowledge.

[Nietzsche]

Solved: Re: My SAS Certification Log - Page 2 - SAS Support Communities

How is this even acceptable to have a SAS community mod accepting another SAS employee's response as my solution and mark my thread as "solved" without my knowledge? Firstly, there is no "solution" in my thread as it is just for logging about my certification journey, my thread is not about Programming 2, programming 2 is just one of many courses/books I plan to do. Secondly, I would not have accepted Stacey's response as my solution anyway even the thread is about Programming 2.

Having mods having the ability to arbitrarily marking another SAS employee's response as official solution is very totalitarian for the lack of better word.

[ChrisHemedinger · Accepted solution]

Hi @Nietzsche,

Thanks for sharing your experience in studying for SAS certification, and for using the SAS Community as a sounding board.

Since your original topic was not meant as a question, but simply a discussion, I modified the thread to mark it as "No solution needed for this topic."  That is a checkbox that is available when you create a post, but it's subtle and easy to miss. With this checked, the "Accept Solution" button is not enabled and the topic doesn't "count" as an unanswered question.

As far as SAS moderators marking solutions -- that is a standard practice in support communities such as ours. The community is here to help SAS users learn and find answers to their questions. When someone posts a question they have their specific need for an answer, but then the same topic may resonate with hundreds or thousands of future users who are looking for similar information. Solved topics provide a faster path to the answers people seek, and they rank better on search engines.

As moderators we often accept solutions when the original poster doesn't come back to do so. Those solutions are often provided by other community members, not only SAS employees. We want community members to get "credit" for their helpful contributions. When a solution is accepted (by the original poster or by a moderator), all participants/subscribers for that particular topic receive a notification with the details (depending on notification settings in your account preferences).

Chris

[ballardw]

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@Nietzsche wrote:

Having mods having the ability to arbitrarily marking another SAS employee's response as official solution is very totalitarian for the lack of better word.

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As a non-SAS employee I also find the "abandonment" of topics somewhat "rude". I spend some of my time to help someone and occasionally don't even get a response of any type much less the very low budget reward of an accepted solution.

From a fair amount of experience I can say there is seldom a rush to "arbitrarily marking" a response as a solution. I have gotten notifications of "accepted solutions" as much as 3 years after the post accepted as solution was made. Also, typically these relate to pretty basic syntax or option related questions.