reputation of the endorser is important when considering whether to trust a solution or not
you can incentivize mods to endorse answers well so they get more publicity for themselves and any company they may represent
you can identify mods who endorse wrong answers and train them to do better
makes it clear that a mod has endorsed the correct answer, not the OP
i.e., lots of people have a mental model of how this feature works from stack overflow, where the OP can mark the answer correct. This is unwise for applications where you can’t immediately verify the solution works, and the OP doesn’t have authority on whether the solution is correct, e.g. tax law as is the case for my tax advice discussion board/forum
how
I’m not too picky here, but at the minimum the endorser’s name should be prominently displayed and a hyperlink to their profile included:
The way I see it, the OP decides whether an answer is correct and marks it as such.
In cases where staff is allowed to mark answers as a solution, they don’t act as themselves, they act on behalf of the community. Which makes it less / not important who marked the solution as such.
Wouldn’t the presentation of that be useful? If OP doesn’t mark it as solved, then I’d at least like to know that it was marked solved by someone with a solid background in the topic, and not just someone with the power to do so.
Surely moderation should be traceable and transparent as often as possible? This improves both of those factors.
I agree that those who have that power should use it carefully.
I am not sure if the solution would be “at the minimum the endorser’s name should be prominently displayed and a hyperlink to their profile included” though.
Over and over again I have wished I could tell who marked a post the solution: whether it was the OP or someone who (for whatever reason) wanted to close the topic
I’ve slipped your post over to this topic to group the requests together.
This also cropped up elsewhere too recently and I created a small data explorer query so at least admins(/groups who were granted access) could have a ‘look-up’:
-- [params]
-- topic_id :topic_id
SELECT target_topic_id,
acting_user_id,
created_at::date
FROM user_actions
WHERE target_topic_id = :topic_id
AND action_type = 15
ORDER BY created_at DESC
It’s not exactly what the feature request is aiming for, but may help in some cases.