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On self-answered questions, is it inappropriate to mark my own answer "Works for me" immediately?
Would it discourage others from posting answers, if they saw that a question had an answer with a "works for me" indication applied immediately? (More so than just seeing an immediate, comprehensive answer?)
Could that ever be desirable? Or would it cause hurt feelings etc.?
3 answers
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I don't think it is inappropriate for someone to mark their own answer "Works for me" on self-answered questions, but it feels a little bit redundant since the answer is expected to work for the poster.
Bear in mind that unlike on some other question and answer sites, the "Works for me" reaction is not restricted to the author of the question. Anyone can add that reaction, whether they posted the question or not. You can also add that reaction to more than one answer to the same question.
This lack of exclusivity means that the reaction is just general feedback, rather than being a unique distinguishing mark. Seeing that reaction should not put other people off from posting an answer of their own.
Since it is not final, there is no reason to delay the reaction. If the answer works for you, feel free to add the reaction.
On the contrary, I think that it is appropriate and recommended practice.
That way you (the poster of the question) can pick your own answer as the "official" one, since these post often (ought to) take a lot of time to write. Although others are obviously also welcome to post other answers even though it is self-answered Q&A.
If you decided to post a self-answered Q&A you likely do so because you think that you possess some relatively in-depth knowledge of the specific topic. If someone who doesn't know the topic quite as well as you posts an answer, you might want a way to single out the self-answered one by other means than looking at the user name.
As an example I once wrote some self-answered Q&A regarding error handling where I clearly wasn't on the same "wave length" as the community. The question itself was well-received, but it was a bit of a subjective and sensitive topic. My answer was apparently too controversial to the regular devs who've been taught how to do error handling by the book for standard applications.
Whereas my answer actually originated from experience of implementing the C standard library and similar library-quality code to be used in hard real-time, safety-critical applications - something that probably not many users here have experience of. Either way, I didn't quite managed to get the point through and the self-answered answer got down-voted to oblivion. I could still use "works for me" to single out my own answer, or otherwise going by votes cast alone, it would make my answer seem low quality.
(I stand by the position that excessive and superfluous error checking should not be done inside libraries but as close to the point in the calling code where said error may appear for the first time and votes be damned. The answer probably did not get the argument through though...)
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