ExpressionEngine and the case of two right answers

Question

I'm sure this has been asked on other sites before though, I will ask it just the same here as it relates to ExpressionEngine quite a bit:

Questioners have the ability to set which answer they think is the correct answer.

I find in ExpresssionEngine there is often times more than one right way of doing things and it really comes down to things like which answer did they try first, which answer made sense to them at that time or things like add-ons which fit into the client budget (free vs commercial.)

Point being that there really isn't anything which allows us to set more than one correct answer. We have comments though, that means people have to read them. We have up votes which means the non chosen answer could be moved up to the top along with the chosen one though, at the end of the day the chosen answer will be viewed as the best route more times than not.

How do we avoid favoring one answer over another when they are both valid answers and both could be great options for anyone with the same question in the future?

Answer 1

I think this is not ExpressionEngine specific - pretty much every problem has more than one possible solution, and especially so in programming.

Don't try to think of it as "this answer" vs "that answer" though. A great answer would lay down a few possible solutions, and suggest which one would be appropriate in different situations.

However, in cases where there are a few good answers submitted, I think the whole point of Stack Overflow is that the "best" answers will naturally float to the top (as voted by everyone who comes across the question in future). The "Mark as Accepted" button doesn't really have much significance other than pinning that answer to the top, and giving the answerer +15 rep. Having more than one good answer per question is baked into the DNA of Stack Exchange (much more so than a forum IMO).

Answer 2

Well in those cases ideally none of the answers would be marked as correct but instead all the right ones would be upvoted, but in reality that's not likely to happen.