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As the title says: I've noticed over the past month or so that a lot of new users tend to accept questions after only a couple of hours.

I know that it isn't mandatory for users to wait 24h to accept answers (like it is with accepting self-answers, I think it's 48h for those), and I have accepted answers myself before 24h is up (although I tend to wait the 24h these days), but generally everyone here considers it to be best practice.

Given that, I just checked the tour and found that it doesn't say anything about that, it simply says:

The person who asked can mark one answer as "accepted".

Would it be a good idea to update the tour to suggest that it's best to wait 24h? Note that I do not think it should become mandatory, just that it might be a good idea for this best practice to become more visible.

NB: This was written with the assumption that everyone was on board with the 24h thing. See accepted answer and my comment below it.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Heh, we seem to have uncovered a difference between some rules and some norms. ;) \$\endgroup\$
    – KorvinStarmast
    Nov 27, 2018 at 16:16

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We can't actually edit that part of the tour just for this site, so this is a Stack Exchange dev thing.

But, also, no. The tour shouldn't be updated to say that. This isn't necessarily a “generally accepted best practice” to wait a while before accepting an answer — it's something some vocal people think should happen. Not everyone agrees that should happen and many never ask for people to do this. Some people think it's a bad idea to encourage people to wait (I'm in that group) and some don't care.

For my own part I don't think it's fair to represent it as “generally everyone here considers it to be best practice”. Fair to say you support it personally, but that generalisation is [citation needed], and I don't think the stats on the sizes of those groups are available.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I was not aware that there were those who dislike the "wait 24h" thing, or at least that there were some who know about it and don't care. I assumed that there were only two "camps"; those that support it and those that don't know about it (because they're new). Although I am in support of that practice, I by no means want to "push" for it if its appeal is not as universal as I had assumed (your answer here is literally the first I've ever seen of anyone saying they're not for it). \$\endgroup\$
    – NathanS
    Nov 22, 2018 at 15:00
  • \$\begingroup\$ Also, on my "side question", do you think that it is worthy of its own question? Your answer kinda addresses it already by saying that we can't update the Tour page ourselves (and I assume this is true of the accepted hover text as well?), but on the other hand, there is a contradiction, so presumably if this is a system-wide thing, it affects all the sites? Obviously it's not that important, though... \$\endgroup\$
    – NathanS
    Nov 22, 2018 at 15:01
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    \$\begingroup\$ That's probably worth bringing up as its own thing, yeah. It's good to mention. \$\endgroup\$
    – doppelgreener
    Nov 22, 2018 at 15:25
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    \$\begingroup\$ Thanks, I've done that now. Also, I hope you appreciate the irony of me accepting your answer in under 24h :P \$\endgroup\$
    – NathanS
    Nov 22, 2018 at 16:44
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    \$\begingroup\$ Haha, yes, I do. :D \$\endgroup\$
    – doppelgreener
    Nov 22, 2018 at 17:38

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