up vote 5 down vote favorite

Taken from here.

BenBrocka mentioned within the comments that he was going to post his answer soon. He posted that on Oct 6th. I posted my answer (which was based off of Brocka's answer) on Oct 16. Obviously, he either forgot about the question or just couldn't get off his mobile that he never posted an answer.

Was I wrong in this case to "take" his answer? (EDIT: I feel kind of bad for taking his answer)

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As long as you attribute your answer, you're good. Since you did that, then there's no issue. – fbueckert Dec 18 '12 at 20:19
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If you feel uncomfortable with it, you have the option of making your answer Community Wiki. However, I agree that there is no issue with this. SE's focus is to provide answers! – Matthew Read Dec 18 '12 at 22:01

1 Answer

up vote 6 down vote accepted

In this case I think it's cool; post was attributed, the "original" poster forgot to post for 10 days (I'm sure I have a few other "I'll answer after I research this" comments out there on Borderlands questions...).

In the future you could @ ping the user who didn't answer to remind them. In this case the answer was pretty trivial though. The effort I'd personally exhort to give credit to the original "answerer" would scale to how much effort it takes to actually learn it. If it's common knowledge or a super simple test, sure, post it and attribute, maybe ping them if you feel generous. If the pseudo-answer clearly took effort to figure out I'd @ ping them and wait longer for a response and optionally make the post Community Wiki to assuage my guilt once it appears the answer isn't going to happen.

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Well said! Now about making the post Community Wiki..... – Retrosaur Dec 19 '12 at 17:36

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