The issue isn't with AskHistorians. People should instead be complaining to reddit and getting them to change the freaking comment count to whats actually in there. Its incredibly stupid to push these problems off on the subs to have to try and find a work around, when the big issue is on the sites end.

There's a lot of comments here about why something like this wouldn't work and isn't done, but a solution that I have found very helpful and would recommend to you is to use the browser extension. It's called Ask Historians Comment Helper and is available on Chrome and Firefox.

What it does is display a second number that tells you how many top-level comments are actually there and haven't been deleted. So if you see something like 100 comments (2), you'll know there are answers, whereas 100 comments (0) tells you everything is deleted.

As is, the current process discourages users from actually opening and reading threads with answers because there's no way of telling which ones are or aren't answered. There's such a small chance of actually hitting a thread with answers that I (and I imagine others) have just stopped checking.

As I understand it from The Mods, requests for Answered flair are the most common suggestion made. Here's a relevant Rules Roundtable as to why we don't have it.

To ease your browsing experience and get just already-written content, I highly recommend the channels laid out in the AutoMod autopost on every thread. If you're on desktop, the Browser Extension will make for a much smoother browsing experience. (May AutoMod's circuits always run without overheat!)

EDIT: In case you're more the listening type, I must cry that AutoMod is most remiss for not also directing people to The AskHistorians Podcast, with contributions not just from our flairs but also sometimes outside experts. Rest your eyes, lend the Podcast your ears!

It seems that you are being pedantic about "answered". OP is asking for a tag that shows that at least one answer post has been approved. Maybe choose a different term like "Responses" or "Posts Approved".

I stickied the 'Official Moderator Response' already which goes through most of the various issues in play here, but I want to just hammer on on and expand separately and specifically, since it isn't one of the big reasons for us, but it is, I think, the biggest reason for readers when it comes to downsides that impact them. That is to say users might not care about increasing mod workload - rude - and they might not actually care about the nitty-gritty of the historical process and out concerns about perception of a response with v. without "Answered" Flair, but presumably they do care about there being content to read in an absolute sense. After all this issue is raised because they want to be able to consume more of it.

But, and i cannot stress this enough, even if we caved and said "*fine, the desire of the users is so overwhelming here, against our better judgement we will implement 'Answered' Flair", the result for users would be a declining amount of content.

I don't mean this even regarding our concerns about how it might decrease interest in contributions, but rather I mean we, as mods, would approve fewer answers, and we would take longer to do our due diligence on what ones are approved (likely meaning we remove them for awhile while we do our confirmations to make sure they ought to be up). As it is now, we do a lot of checks on answers anyways - I won't go into details to keep this short, but you can find more explanation of how Mods judge answers here - but that is for the current way of doing things.

We do not, and never have, claimed we're perfect, and bad answers definitely make it through sometimes. Sometimes they only make it through until another mod catches something, in other cases a trusted flaired user might be the one to flag it for us, and in yet others it is a regular user who provides a takedown. We, as mods, are the frontline of bullshit detectors here, and we have a lot of tools for fighting it, but it is a process that involves the entire community, and this is important because **"Answered" Flair stands to fundamentally alter that in two critical ways.

The first is in its likely clamping down on a willingness to disagree. We get plenty of modmails, which we deeply appreciate, from users who flag issues with an answer, and we always look into them. Sometimes they are wrong, sometimes they are minor enough to not be reason for removal, and sometimes they are on the money and we kill the response, but whatever the outcomes, we always try to make sure the user who raised the issue knows we appreciate it and that they are helping out. We also see it in comments where a user might say something like "The mods should maybe look into [xxxxxx issue xxxxx] as I'm not sure that is correct". The point here being that there is recognition of how we work from these users. We do our basic due diligence, but aren't signing off absolutely, and users also help by raising issues to us. Giving an answer positive approval though has two opposite results which are both fairly negative. The first is how is can dissuade some users from speaking up - "I don't think this is right, but the mods approved it, so maybe I'm the one wrong here" is a reaction we rarely want to encourage. Second is creating an antagonizing relationship with potentially quite learned users, who instead of flagging for our attention, now are starting at "I can't believe the mods approved this when it is clearly wrong about [xxxx issue xxxxx]". This is similarly something we don't want to have happen. All together, this now feeds into the second, larger issue.

As addressed more in the Roundtable I linked above, there is a smell test we apply to an answer which is an holistic evaluation. Making up numbers for purpose of analogy, lets say it is a score out of 20, where 5 points each are possible for source use, quality of argument, depth of content, and readability, and right now, to pass my 'smell test' an answer needs a 12-14 - so either it needs to nail some things if it doesn't do others at all (5, 2, 5, 2), or it needs to do everything passably well (3, 3, 3, 3). At that level, I can't guarantee it but I do have enough confidence to leave it standing (if I ran into it), or clear the report (if someone else reported it).

Now let's add "Answered" Flair to the mix, and now as a mod I'm not only saying "OK, I'm not removing you" but rather I'm saying "OK, I'm endorsing you and signaling to readers this answer is mod approved". If I'm doing that, my smell test is going to have to change, as I'm going to need to have a higher confidence level to sign off in that way. So maybe I'm now at 14-16 for where my 'smell test' level is. So of the two examples I made up above, only the first one would even be something I consider approving, and it is just on the lower edge, while the second one is a clear removal. Because we aren't enforcing a simple binary. We're enforcing a confidence level, where there is always a gray area, and "Answered" Flair basically means we're shifting ourselves from "Approve at Confidence of 65% ±5" to "approve at "Confidence of 75% ±5". (and again, I stress I'm making up numbers to provide an easy to express analogy for an holistic process. We don't use a scorecard that is quite so straightforward in reality).

So what this all comes down to is that if we are changing our process to one that is pre-emptive, clear, positive approval of all responses left up, it means we, as mods, will need to feel more confident about what we approve than we are currently, and be stricter than we currently are already.

#It means that we would be approving a noticeably smaller number of answers, leading to a reduction in responses on the sub.

This has several knock-on effects. While we may now have answered flair (yay!), it also means more frustration with unanswered questions. It means popular questions take even longer to get answered than they do currently. It means fewer get answered at all.

And maybe for some that is a welcome trade-off (although, I would stress, not for mods who get literal death threats sometimes for removing shitty answers), with some users reading all this and saying "I'd take half the answers for noticeably better uniformity in quality". But it also means fewer contributors, and long term brain drain, and thus long term decline in even the best stuff.

Yes, the top-notch flairs you know and love will be just fine, but it cuts off the pipeline of new ones. Flairs are made, not born, and contributors grow as writers and historians here. They might start out writing just good enough answers (or even with a warning or two!), but you can check out the sub archives and see how much long time contributors have improved. Increasing the bar for what is "just good enough" though cuts off many of them. Users who used to be able to get a foot in the door by just getting by, and then growing as contributors never get that start because they can't even reach that bar.

So anyways, there are a lot of issues in play here, but this one is one that I think deserves particular attention, and hopefully that all lays out the issue well enough.

Am I the only one who thinks it's hilarious to see 175 comments and then open it to find all were deemed unworthy? I legitimately laugh and save it if it's a good question.

Keep me guessing mods, I like the gamble.

Am I alone in feeling this isn't a huge problem? It takes about 5 seconds to open a thread, see it isn't answered, and pop back out. I've never really had an issue with this.

If I'm interested in the question, I check and if there are no answers, I just check back later. I generally skim through the round-up posts if I feel like just reading. I can just go through quality responses there.

It's absolutely minuscule in comparison to the hassle it is to sift through the jokes / off-the-mark responses on similar subs that don't delete have similar levels of moderation.

Obviously Zhukov has already posted a 2-part answer explaining why we don’t choose to do that as part of our moderation, but I’d like to point out another thing: do you use r/OutOfTheLoop? They do the answered flair on threads with answers ...and I find it pretty inconsistent to the extent that I ignore the presence of that flair. Half the time when I click it and it doesn’t have the flair it’s got something that looks like an answer to me, and vice versa. So I suspect we’d be about successful at doing it as them (otherwise they seem a well-moderated subreddit - not criticising them) and it wouldn’t end up being a useful thing for deciding to click on a thread.

The other thing to remember is that Reddit doesn’t just show you the most popular threads - it shows you a carefully algorithmically curated selection of stuff from the subreddits you subscribe to, which ranks some things higher than others. Our experience as moderators here is that we‘re a bit screwed by the algorithm. After all, for most of Reddit, if you click on it and don’t see anything interesting and then click back, Reddit rightly assumes you probably don’t need to see it again. Whereas because our rules go against the grain of the website, it means we get a lot of people who click once, see no answer, and then Reddit never shows it to them again. Even though, 2 hours later, the thread has matured and it looks like there’s an answer in the thread.

As a rule of thumb, almost everything that is popular - 1000 upvotes plus - will probably get an answer. So if you click on a thread and don’t see an answer - save the thread or use the remindmebot function (which is why there’s an automod message about that in every thread!) and you should then see an answer when you check back a few hours later. Hopefully!

Agree! I can't tell you how many times I've been frustrated with unanswered posts.

With all due respect to the mods (genuinely, I understand how labor intensive this is, and the roundtable makes it clear), something needs to change. I appreciate the effort with the things like a browser add-on, mailing list, etc, but this is Reddit, it places a large burden on the reader to use all of these outside tools just to arrive at a somewhat user-friendly experience. I don’t have an answer for you or a silver bullet, you all have thought this through. I guess I would only suggest that Reddit is a platform not exactly amenable to the stringency put on posts in this sub. As a user and fan of this sub, it is indeed disheartening to comb through threads and find so little to read at times, so much so that I would perhaps even prefer less stringency (which perhaps could translate Into less mod labor) if it meant more readable material.

Maybe an “answered” flair is the wrong word. Perhaps just a “content available” flair, which makes no value judgement as to the answer that is there.

As I said elsewhere, the browser extension does not work on mobile. The Sunday digest often has to be sought out at it is poorly upvoted.

I appreciate the mods reasoning of not endorsing one historical perspective over another. When I see an AskHistorians thread on my feed, I make a mental note that it may be too early to open so I don’t open. But every once in a while, I remember to open the top posts of the week/month and generally find my answers there.

I find that not knowing whether a given question will be answered tends to push me towards exploring the subreddit in general at a later time, and seeing questions/answers I wasn’t initially looking for.

I feel that an answered flair á la OutOfTheLoop would make my exploration of this sub much more brief and surface level.

Just want to add to the appreciation for this sub’s vision and standards. I’ve been reading this tread for the last hour and am floored by how combative some people are being.

I think the moderators have expressed their reasoning why it doesn’t work for their vision well and appreciate their articulation that they are working towards a larger vision. That’s why the quality here is so high. If it was more lax the quality would go down. Most readers I believe wouldn’t want that, but as they said ultimately it’s up to them and it’s above and beyond to engage so much with the community as to why they are making the decisions they are. You don’t have to agree, but flat out saying their reasoning doesn’t make sense I think is missing the point. It’s gray. And where it’s gray it’s their call. And again they are actually respectfully stating why they view it as gray. This is a free product and there are a million alternatives if this isn’t your jam. I personally appreciate the standards. So much of the internet is a free-for-all and it’s nice having a space with rigor and principals that guide the content. Thanks again mod team!

I highly suggest the browser extension.

The workload of removing well-meaning-but-unsatisfactory answers is (I assume) gigantic, especially since removed answers are generally accompanied by a gentle "this is why I removed your post" explanation from the mod.

My opinion is that adding some variation of "answered" flair (requiring mods to judge threads now and forever as answered or not) would be a bridge too far. The browser extension is easy to find and automates that process.

Yeah especially on the app, which takes an eternity to load the comments section, this is disappointing.

I appreciate that even a small thing such as “post flair” is thought about and fleshed out from all angles on this sub. Thank you Mods. Proud to be a part of this community.

I just want to say I *LOVE* and appreciate the care the mods put into this community. Thank you!

Any time I see a meta thread I take the opportunity to thank the mod team for their tireless efforts. This is one of the best subreddits on the site because of it.

I absolutely agree that an "answered" flair would stifle discussion but for this problem, something as simple as a flair indicating the thread isn't empty would work fine. No need to make any value judgements besides "We didn't delete this one post so the flair goes up"

and when the team is sometimes deleting hundreds of posts it doesn't feel like it would be too hard to implement something like that.

I really wish THIS post was flaired as "answered"

How about the inverse of this? An unanswered flair that gets added automatically and is removed once a comment is made. It wouldn't discourage other from adding onto the discussion, would encourage discourse to start, and prevent situations where you expect an answer and get none.

subscribe to /r/HistoriansAnswered instead. It is an auto generated group I think.

Or at least have it so that deleted comments don't show up in the comment total on the main page.

You can find our position and explanation on this here. I will repost the entire Roundtable below, but would stress one thing. We get this request periodically, either via META threads or Modmail, and however much people want it to happen, it isn't going to unless the issues laid out below could be ameliorated, and they are not simply issues of "Add flair!" They are issues of manpower, issues of technical limitations of the platform, and issues of the historical process itself, and none of them are easily surmountable however much it is something which, on the surface, may seem like an obvious feature to add for many, and however many upvoted a request for it may get from time to time.

#I Don't Want to Read All That Below. Tell Me The Most Important Things

Normally I save this for the end, but to put it up front instead, trust me when I say that if we thought it would work, we would implement it. If nothing else it would get y'all to stop asking! We really do take it seriously though, and probably once a year, at least, we have a discussion on the matter to see whether anything has changed from the reasons explained below, but for better or for worse, little does.

But while 'Answered' flair might not be in play, we do our best to provide several alternatives to give users the best browsing experience we can, and to enjoy as much content as possible.

• Every thread has a Remind Me Bot link pre-filled and stickied to the top. Click than, and you just need to send the PM. Easy-peasy, fire and forget, and you'll be reminded to come back in a day or two when an answer is much more likely there.
• Last year, we were super psyched to be able to roll out our very own browser extension with the help of a wonderful community member, which we highly encourage using to view the 'real' comment count in a thread.
• We also encourage subscribing to the 'Weekly Roundup' provided by /u/subredditsummarybot to get a summary of the top content each week right to your inbox.
• The moderators also maintain several places that we feature the best content, including Twitter, Facebook, the Sunday Digest, and the Best Of Awards.\

We hear a lot of suggestions for things to change about the subreddit. Some are easy enough to reject, others we give serious thought to, and occasionally, we get a really good one that helps us develop changes for the subreddit. But by far there is no suggestion we hear more than the request that we implement "Answered" flair, which is something that we, perhaps infamously, have not done despite this.

While it is a suggestion that seems self-evident to many, unfortunately, it isn't quite so straightforward an idea. And while we aren't opposed to it per se, we are opposed to implementation of such a scheme in a way that wouldn't be fair and equitable in application, not to mention something which can be administered easily and in a uniform manner. As such, there are a number of impediments, both practical and philosophical, that prevent us from putting such a flair into effect.

###There is Rarely One Answer

One of the biggest issues facing such a scheme comes down to the historical method itself. Different historians can look at the same evidence, and come to different conclusions. Neither one is necessarily invalid, and the debate between those competing positions can tell us just as much about a topic as the answers themselves, sometimes more even as it can help suss out details and thoughts on the process itself. In a space such as these, we generally do not want to endorse one perspective over another. Ideally, an answer on a topic which is subject to hot debate within the academy should make that clear enough itself, but we, as moderators, not only don't want to take sides there, but we simply shouldn't be seen as favoring one academic interpretation over another.

Just as we remove comments in a thread because of how the first comment, whatever its quality, can so often become the 'hot' comment of a thread, we likewise don't want to be crediting as 'answered' a thread because the first comment which meets the rules has arrived. Put simply, we aren't endorsing anything here as the definitive answer. Responses which are not removed meet certain criteria which reflect fidelity to the historical method, but history is a process, and rarely do we end up with so definitive a picture that we can reject any and all alternatives with certainty.

####Stifling of Contributions

Closely tied into this is what such a flair would potentially do to the quality of content in the subreddit. We aren't simply speculating, but know well from many discussions with Flaired contributors, that the presence of "Answered" flair on a thread would make them less inclined to contribute further. An answer in the thread might be decent and just enough to justify being left up, but there is a ton more to say, or another important angle to offer. With 'Answered' flair there is simply less incentive to do so. It gives the thread a sense of finality that disincentives further contributions.

####Workflow of Moderation

Moderating is often like being a grad student TA, assigned to a class that isn't actually in your focus. We can evaluate a lot about an answer using general principles of the historical method. We can consider the construction of the arguments, and how well the piece communicates its information. We can check sources and see whether they a) exist b) are well reviewed and c) make mention of the topics at hand. But we aren't all experts on everything. Between the whole team, we have an incredibly wide coverage, but we necessarily must do triage at times.

Say a question about 12th century France is posted. I, knowing nothing about the topic, can evaluate an answer on the criteria noted above, and decide is passes the smell test. Or maybe I think there is something fishy, but can't quite put my finger on it, but either way, I decide that there isn't justification for removal based on my reading but in either case, while not removing it, I'll flag it to the attention of the mod team's medievalists to have a look. When they are able to, they will also give it a look. Maybe they decide it is fine. But maybe they pick up on something that I wouldn't be aware of. From there, we have several approaches. If bad enough, obviously, we'll remove and warn the user. If it is missing something major, we might remove it with a DM explaining the issue and suggestions on how to fix it after which we review to reinstate. Or maybe the issue is kind of in that grey area, in which case we would leave it up for now but with some pointed follow-up question to try and suss out a bit more from the user, and only remove if their response indicates that they are already past the extent of their knowledge.

So the question is... at what point does the "Answered" flair go up? Is it when I first decide "smells OK"? But it might still be removed later! Is it after the 'in-field' mod makes their first assessment? Still might be removed depending on the latter stages. For some cases, it can easily be several stages over 24 hours for a response is definitely there to stay. Even beyond standard workflow, there are plenty of other things that might happen. Perhaps it turns out a response was plagiarized, so must be removed. Perhaps a respondent refuses to provide sources after request, so must be removed. And of course, because it was originally noted as "answered", other potential respondents already decided not to bother!

####Mechanics of the Flair

Even if we are able to work through all of those issues, which is easier said than done, just how is this being applied? In the end, it needs to be applied manually by the mods. Although there are ways that flair can be automated with bots, those are "dumb" solutions, which is to say, a bot can know there is a comment in the thread with at least 700 words or something, but it can't know if they are good words.

Likewise, although the creator of a thread can add flair themselves, beyond the fact that it isn't something we can assume will be done consistently, it also isn't up to the OP to judge the quality of the response as it is in some other subreddits such as /r/AskHistory. A response may be posted, they may read it and add the flair before a mod sees it... only for the mod to quickly see glaring issues that might not be obvious to a layperson, but utterly sink the quality from a more informed view.

So in the end, it would have to be something the mod team does manually, only after evaluation of an answer. This places a burden on us beyond what we already carry, as it creates a number of pressures, including to act quicker than we currently do, and also to be more accurate in our assessments of answers than we already are.

½

As a non-historian, Id often appreciate a space to answer "just use some fucking common sense!" Im not suggesting you allow it. Im just saying it would be nice.

This is exactly what I said yesterday, and I got downvoted into oblivion.

Yes please. I echo everything the OP has stated.

How about this:

1. All posts start off with an 'unanswered' flair.
2. If there is an answer that satisfies the poster, they can reply to the answer with a comment containing a character (see Δ in CMV) or message that simply removes the 'unanswered' flair.
3. Optionally, the flair removal will notify the mods, who, in their own time can a. Do nothing - the usual default b. Reinstated the 'unanswered' flair c. Very Very rarely, bestow the 'Answered' Flair.

+1,000,000

Getting far too pedantic about what constitutes "answered". Why not just a flair that signifies "Has at least one answer", then it's up to the reader to decide how well it's answered!

All we want to know is whether it's worth even clicking on the link! Even a terribly answered message is better than a row of deleted comments!

I suggested adding a "∅" tag to all new posts, signifying that it is likely unanswered, and have the symbol be removed when there is a top comment with a long answer (all done with automoderator). And the symbol can be added or removed by mods as necessary if it goes wrong. That would require minimal effort by mods and would be a big improvement.

I second this

Ya this sub sucks because of that

The fact this is flaired as "meta" is just perfect.

Can answers stop being deleted or removed when they have hundreds or thousands of upvotes as well?