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

Actually I do not offer points for either question or answer. Points are only awarded if the user get votes on their posts, which will happen only if the post is good. So cheating on this level is very much impossible.

Secondly, not many users give answers to their own question and if they do then the percentage for those users is just 2% to 3% (which is very low). So giving answers to their own questions is like a privilege which I have given to my users. Now before users start miss using this privilege, I need the reward for "Best Answer" to be discontinued.
Now what will happen is, even if the user selects his own answer as best, so he will he happy and satisfied about it. But this won't be offensive to other users who gave answer on his question (because no points are awarded).

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"So cheating on this level is very much impossible" => Never say never. It is always possible to cheat: you could have additional accounts and from them you could upvote your answers/questions of your "real" users

"I need the reward for "Best Answer" to be discontinued" => As I said in the answer, you can't discontinue something that has never existed

"But this won't be offensive to other users..." => I think you meant "this will be". Again, if the answer is correct and accurate, then other users shouldn't find it offensive. If the answer makes no sense then the issue is quite different and the user should be "punished" for spamming rather than answering their own questions because they are not following the forum's rules.

I think it is all of matter of setting points and rules accordingly to something that satisfies your needs. Different users have different needs for their forums. I think the best thing you could ask for would be to allow admins to configure how many points should be assigned for selecting an own answer and how many points should be assigned for selecting other users' answers. That should be flexible enough

PS: Has this actually ever happened to anyone? I just can't imagine someone asking and answering their own questions just to get points for SELECTING answers...

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When I said "So cheating on this level is very much impossible" I really meant that. On my website, for a user to vote either a question or answer - he needs some points, which can only be gained through some positive contribution on the website. So even a user makes a new account then also he has to go through all the privileges level again and that would be very time consuming. But there can be a chance that one or two users even do that, then I never said it is completely impossible to cheat... ;)

Alright if the user is not getting "Best Answer" reward then I have confused that because I have set both "Selecting best answer" and "Having a best answer" to the same reward.
Now in this particular scenario, can we rule out points for even selection of "best answer" because the user himself is doing this.

When it comes to offensive thing, then I have written right because in last para I am saying about user not getting any points, so who will be offensive for that?

"Has this actually happened to anyone?"... Yes this has happened on my own website as the same user has first questioned, waited for two day - got some answers and then gave his own answer, after this he selected that as best.
Now this thing got into my notice when only his questions was having best answers on the homepage.

Even very small amount of users will use this thing to fool the system but if this can be stopped then why not (points for selection of your answer as best to your own question)?

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Changing the point of the discussion to what seems to be the actual issue. You mentioned this:

"... the same user has first questioned, waited for two day - got some answers and then gave his own answer, after this he selected that as best."

However, I find absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, I've actually done that myself (http://www.question2answer.org/qa/30898) and I'm not embarrassed at all. Furthermore, users can benefit from my answer too.

As a side note, assume a feature to disallow giving points to users selecting their own answers was implemented. Now, consider that users can still take the same steps regardless of the fact that they won't get any points. For example, they could do this to have the selected answers count in their profiles increased. So you're not really removing the cause of the issue, if there is any issue at all.

So if you think there is something wrong with the attitude of some users probably it would be better to remind them of the TOS, which I guess have something like this covered. If not, maybe adding a "Users must act in good faith" clause or something like that.

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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...