There's nothing wrong with reposting a question, if it's gone a long while without an answer. I posted a question several months ago, and it got zero response, so after a month or so went by, I cut and pasted the post into a new post, and that one got several quality answers. As long as you wait a good long while to see if the first post gets an answer, I think you're OK to repost it.

NOTE I'm neither a mod nor a researcher, so my interpretation of the rules might be wrong. If so, please correct me

You may be interested in this rules roundtable explaining the difficulty of tagging questions 'answered'.

There are great questions that get a lot of up votes and no quality answers. There are plenty of very interesting questions that get maybe 20 upvotes and no answers either.

Factors to consider when you see upvoted questions without answers: the guidelines for a quality answer are quite strict; there are only so many flaired users (the people most likely to be able to sufficiently answer a question); someone who can provide a good, sourced answer may not be on or even see the question; the people browsing the subreddit may not be versed in that area of history; an answer can already be found from a search or in the sidebar, among other things.

This is just the nature of Reddit. Tons of questions come and go through here without getting an answer. Trying to remedy this would just needlessly complicate things in my opinion.

This would be wonderful. So many times I click on interesting questions with hundreds of upvotes and find no answers. I understand it takes time to compose quality responses, but I too often forget about a thread by the time a good answer comes along just due to the way reddit is structured. Highlighting in a new post answers to old questions would be a good work around.

Thank you mods for politely and patiently responding to the "please create an answered tag" question when it is inevitably asked every week.

I just don't think it's realistic to expect the mods to maintain this and subscribers to not bicker/fight over the details.

I will never understand why this is such a pressing issue. What benefit does this serve? No having to click into the comments of a thread and then hit the back button? Lessening the wanton injury of not seeing the answer you were entitled to because of upvotes?

Well, I'm not adding much to the debate, but as someone who comes in here to read interesting answers I find no shortage of those and if I click on a question that has not been answered, I do not become filled with utter despair. Thus I never really understood why this question/suggestion comes up so much. Also, plenty of questions that I ask go unanswered and that is simply the only way I can imagine it being - an expectation that literally anything posted will get the effort needed for a good level answer put in, seems highly unrealistic and frankly, entitled. The mods and the flairs are already doing a huge amount of work to keep the sub as informative and well managed as it is, I don't see a point in them doing even more, just to spare few seconds of clicking to some users.

I dont think the mods should give in to this suggestion just because of the number of people who seem to want to see it happen. Lets not forget its the same people who post the 50 substandard replies in every thread which is the root of the problem as it is. I do appreciate your patience to deal with this particular question every other day and all the rest of them as well and I think people should look to fit in with the meta as opposed to suggesting the meta should fit in with their wants. Questions like 'Do I really want to make the same suggestion for the 5th time this month?' or 'Does my answer meet the high standards the sub rules demand?' are a great start

Keep in mind Reddit archives posts after a few months so some won't be able to be answered. This makes a lot of work for mods to go weeding.

Follow up question - can we limit the Damn follow up questions? Maybe only allowed after the original is answered? It's very frustrating to see a cool question then go into the comments and see nothing but another question...

I had a question about lines inside nazi bunkers on omaha beach which went unanswered by anyone who actually knew rather than was speculating.....didn't really know what to do next. Wasn't any way to draw attention to it. Figured that was just it, had no choice but to let it rest unanswered. Was disappointed.

Although mentioned in the thread elsewhere, I just want to re-stress the existence of the Sunday Digest, as some people are either unaware that it is intended to also highlight interesting questions that remained unanswered, not just great answers of the past week, or in some cases not even aware the thread exists at all! Well, it does, and in many ways serves the role of what you are looking for here, although user driven rather than mod driven. It goes up Sunday Morning and is stickied, for a day or two. You can find previous ones here.

Edit: Also to move this up to the top instead of as a reply, I heavily encourage people to use the "Remind Me" bot if you see a thread which is interesting, and which hasn't been answered yet. /u/RemindMeBot can ping you in X amount of time to come back and check the thread later. While we ask that users don't post coments to the bot in thread, the RemindMeBot works via PM too, so you can set up the reminderusing that function in the future.

Aside from that, if you have RES installed, it provides a Subscription function, to keep you subscribed to a thread for a period of time (I think three days?). And simple default reddit has a Save function and also allowed you to see everything you have upvoted.

While I realize it isn't exactly the same thing, not being specifically triggered by an answer being present, the fact is that most questions which end up at the top of the sub do get answered! It takes a little patience, of course, since it may be 10+ hours after a thread goes up, but it usually happens. I just sorted by top and opened up the 20 most popular threads from the past month, of those, only two lacked any real top level answer. This one had links to previous, relevant threads though, leaving only this one. So either 2/20, or 1/20, depending how you want to swing it, but in either case, thats a pretty excellent track record for getting an answer, and I think does make a clear argument that for a trending thread, a simple "Remember to check this thread tomorrow" reminder is nearly as good as a "Ping me when it is answered" alert.

I have a hypothesis about this problem.

I think the problem people are seeing isn't "these questions go unanswered" but rather "seeing a question with no answers is frustrating and I would like it to be answered" regardless of if it were answered last week, month, year, etc, or can be reposted at another time.

A potential but not perfect solution to this could be, a Moderator post that says "Comment on this to be notified of the first answer of over 300 characters to not be deleted from this question."

Then, we can comment, and if someone does post an answer, we would see it again.

That would be a bit of setup with a bot to get working, but I think it would add a lot, and then, the "unanswered questions" could be ranked by how many people eagerly await the answer.

I love this subreddit but why are its mods always so unnecessarily obstinate?

This isn't difficult. As the rules are currently written top level comments have to contain either an answer or a follow-up question of some kind, correct? And when a top level comment doesn't meet the standards of the subreddit that comment is removed by a mod, right?

So why not simply have AutoMod label any post with, say, 100 upvotes but with no valid top-level comment as "no top level comment". Then you can encourage people to filter for "no top level comment" if they're looking for popular questions that didn't receive top level comments that fit the rules of the subreddit.

Easy peasy, nice and sleazy.