Wait few days before accepting answers

Question

There are good reasons to vote early and often, but accepting answers is somewhat different from voting. For the first few (two?) days of each private meta the focus is on asking questions, not answering. The experts who would be able to give detailed, well researched answers will probably do it after emptying their asking buffer and giving their first few loads of votes. In the end of the private beta, we need examples of excellent questions with excellent answers accepted.

When you accept an answer early, you signal that you are satisfied, discouraging those later well-researched answer, and also other good answers adding something new. Having more answers per question is good in general (though there are cases where it is counterproductive). Also, when some better answer arrives, you should re-accept the answer, so that the best answer is accepted at the launch of public beta.

Answer 1

Agreed. Accepting answers early is almost always discouraged on the StackExchange network. This is especially true on sites where questions are much less likely to have one true answer.

Here are some of the templates I typically use to remind the Original Poster that he shouldn't accept too early and that he can remove the mark-as-accepted check.

Remember not to accept an answer too quickly! You might want to wait 24 to 48 hours before accepting to give other people a chance to give you a [different/better] answer. A question with an accepted answer isn't as likely to receive further attention as one without an accepted answer.

[Welcome to the site Username]. I want to point out that we generally encourage you not to accept an answer too quickly. You may want to give other people a chance to give an answer as well and accepting one early tends to discourage other people from replying. You are free to change or remove the mark-as-answered tick at any time and you may want to do so now and wait one or two days to re-evaluate all the answers and accept the one that was most helpful to you.

Welcome to the site Username. It seems like AcceptedUser's answer has proven helpful to you but on StackExchange we often advise you not to accept an answer too quickly. That way there's more of an incentive for others to offer you their take on your question.

Links are optimised for comments so hit edit to get the markdown source, but note that long usernames may break the commenth length limit.

Given that the beta is still private and mostly established StackExchange users will be on here, a simple reminder not to accept too quickly with a link to this meta thread will probably suffice.