If user has selected his own answer as best then he should not be rewarded for that.

Question

There is an option in Q2A which allows users to give answers for their own questions. But if a user do give their own answer and even selects that as best then he should not be awarded the bonus points for "Best Answer".

This way, every user will start to ask a question and then answer it and will also make it best answer to get rewarded points. Can this is done in Q2A??

Comments

Just a "workaround" if you allow anonymous users to answer:
 >Admin >Posting >uncheck: "Allow users to answer their own question"

If they want to answer their own question, they can do it anonymously.

Answer 1

he should not be awarded the bonus points for "Best Answer"

That's actually inaccurate. The user is not given the bonus for a "Best Answer" but rather the bonus for selecting an answer.

As a side note:

This way, every user will start to ask a question and then answer it and will also make it best answer to get rewarded points.

I don't think this would apply for "every user" either. Also if the question and answer are both good, then not allowing to receive a few points for selecting the answer could demotivate a user to answer his own questions too. Furthermore, if users receive points for asking and answering, then even if they don't select the questions they could "cheat" the same way by asking many questions or many answers. In fact, I'd be glad if every user had that degree of participation :)

Comments

Happened to one of my sites too. I was giving out rewards each month (money), and users started to upvote all their answers with other accounts.

This is why I have extended the stop-spam-plugin so that users cannot vote if they have the same IP =) http://www.q2apro.com/plugins/stop-spam - this totally "removed" the false votes because they did not know why they could not vote ;)

Regarding the question title, the topic, I think a user should not get the "points for providing the best answer" if he posted the question and answered the question himself.

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"users cannot vote if they have the same IP" => Thing is IPs can be shared by a lot of people. This will not let "valid" votes pass through. On the other hand, IPs can be easily changed by proxies, the TOR network or just resetting your modem if you happen to have a dynamic IP address, which I'd say most people do. In fact it is possible (and extremely easy) to automate that.

All I can do is make more emphasis in my previous comment. All these suggestions try to mitigate the issue of human a**holeness. But there is no technical solution for that. Only another human could determine that. The appropriate technical approach, IMO, would be to ease the human analysis, rather than replace it. Then take appropriate action based on TOS.

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"IPs can be easily changed by proxies"
Most users don't know what a proxy is ;-)

On the human control level: For editors you can output the users who voted, if they see one guy voting all over again, they can report him.

I once wrote a simple plugin that lists all last votes in a table, is that of need by anyone?

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Yes that plugin can be helpful and specially if that shows the number of votes a user is giving in a particular day...