What do we do with reasonable unanswered questions that are now old and have actually been answered in the comments, many times by the asker himself?

Question

There´s plenty of questions in the unanswered questions section, that are sort of settled: The asker found the answer, the answer is in the comments, and so on. How do we upgrade them to answered or close them altogether?

Answer 1

I guess some case by case approach is necessary. But some things that could be done are:

• If there really is a good answer in the comments, then post it as an actual answer (perhaps with a bit of elaboration, where appropriate).
• If there is no good answer, but the question looks sound, start a bounty to get the question some attention. I guess there are too many unanswered questions to do this on a large-scale basis. But I might have a look through for some promising ones in a little while.
• If there is no answer and this appears to be because the question is a bad one then we should be putting the question on hold. It might be worth double checking how many questions fall into this category.

I suspect that in most cases none of the above apply. I guess we then have little option but to leave the question as-is. Questions in the SE network don't usually get closed just because they are old.