I have an accept rate of 20%.
Everytime I open a new question now, I get comments such as Oh, you should up your accept rate, and Oh, its funny you didn't accept any answers.
I think these comments are out of place and I flagged/removed a few of them.
Can people stop making these types of comments/mod delete them? They're not constructive, waste space on the page, and are pointless.
First, I'll answer the general question: Is it OK for people to comment on one's accept rate?
Yes, it is.
It is inappropriate for people to bring it up in an answer, but the "add comment" feature is for commenting. It is the only non-answer way to actually communicate with someone. And a person who doesn't accept answers needs to be communicated with. If not comments, how would you suggest informing someone about the accept feature if they don't know about it?
Now, I admit that people talking about accept rates does sound like someone trolling for rep. After all, accepted answers are not only worth +15 rep, that's +15 that doesn't get capped at 200. But in general, it is perfectly fine to mention someone's accept rate in a comment.
There are extenuating circumstances that can make it inappropriate. It is entirely possible that a person simply hasn't received many satisfactory answers. Perhaps they asked several questions that went unanswered, or the answers were unsatisfactory.
Now, on to the more specific question: Where do you personally stand on this? I know you didn't ask, but you did use yourself as a specific example. So you left the door open for this.
You've asked 8 questions. You have accepted 1 answer. Namely, your own. FYI: accepting an answer to your own question doesn't give you rep. That's not to say it's wrong; it's perfectly fine if you feel that your answer is the most correct.
Actually, let's look at this question that you answered yourself. It may be telling of a problem.
Your answer was specific to Win32, using Win32 functions and such. Yet your question never once mentioned Win32. To be fair, you did tag the question Windows, but there is a difference between "developing on Windows" and "directly using the Win32 API". For example, since this is a game development site, "developing on Windows" could easily mean that you use DirectInput.
So your question was incomplete. That is why you did not get appropriate answers.
A second question that received multiple answers was the one about keyboard combinations. The comment under your question asked for something very simple: clarification on your API of choice for input. You did not reply, nor did you provide this information.
Despite this, you received several very good answers, detailing how to go about doing exactly what you asked for. There is no reason you could not have marked one of those as an accepted answer.
Then, there is this question about DirectX versions. Quite frankly, that is not a question; that is a rant disguised as a question. It's about you not liking that Microsoft is trying to phase out a 10 year old OS by not allowing newer technologies and APIs to run on it.
I can tell this not just by the language you use to ask the "question" (for example, the pointless use of bold-face text for "if you're running Windows 7!"), but also by how you respond to answers that don't agree. AttackingHobo pointed you to the Steam Survey about DX10 availability, and your first response was to talk about the much smaller DX11 availability. Why? DX11 is only a minor change to the DX10 (in terms of the overall API. Most DX10 code can run as DX11 with at worst a couple of changes), so if you want to code to DX10, there's no real issue.
You did not find any of the answers acceptable, even though most of them made strong points. Granted, as your question was less a question and more a rant, it's hard to say what qualifies as "acceptable". Even so, the blame rests on you for posting a rant rather than a question.
Similarly, I find the tone of this question on having a W component to be... defensive. It sounds like a question that you ask when you think you're discovered something cleverer than most of the code you've seen. Look at those silly guys, carrying around 4D vectors, when I can make do with 3.
Since nobody agreed with this notion, nobody got the accept check. Indeed, Maik made a great point that torpedoes your idea entirely for any use of SSE or similar vector intrinsics. You would lose lots of efficiency by trying to do matrix multiplies your way.
Now, this is not mindless bashing of you. I could very well be wrong about any of the previously stated ideas about your questions. But it seems to me that some of your questions are looking for validation for ideas you already have, rather than actual unknowns that you want answers to. And thus, when you don't get that validation, because others have different opinions about things, you simply don't accept the answers.
Other questions of your seem poorly specified. As such, nobody posts an acceptable answer because you haven't asked the question very well.
Therefore yes, I would say that it is entirely appropriate for you to be called out on your accept history.
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users/998/bobobobo
You have 8 questions, of which 6 have answers. 4 have multiple answers.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a slightly higher accept rate than 20% (what you have now) in this case.
The reason people are making the comments is that a low accept rate is indicative of a user not fully participating in the Q&A format. Accepting answers is important because 1) It gives the selected answer 15 rep, 2) It prevents the question from being bumped automatically by the Community bot to the front page, and 3) It shows people who get to the question via searching for it that a given answer has solved the person's question a little more so than voting alone would.
Some users have, in the past, forgotten about the "accept answer" functionality and community prodding has gotten results.
Obviously, with a small data set like the number of questions you've asked that percentage can be a bit skewed towards a small number. If you feel like your questions haven't been answered (and therefore the "accept answer" would be disingenuous) , I would just ignore them.
If it gets into more of a back and forth flaming situation I'll remove the comments, but if it's just one comment here and there I don't think it's worth intervening.
They're not pointless and definately not out of place; people post them because they feel like your taking advantage of the system, and are warning that on that question you may not get many answers because of your accept rate.
A lot of people spend time researching and thinking to answer questions; if you don't take the time to accept any answers, people will just stop bothering.
If there are no answers that actually answer your question (looking at some of your questions, I believe this is not always the case) then if you find an answer by all means post it and accept it. Otherwise learn to ask answerable questions or explain yourself better.
The site is meant to help people, if you post questions so someone else can find the answer for you with no effort on your part, I think you've come to the wrong place.
If you still don't want this kind of comment, I guess that's ok, but I wouldn't expect your questions to be answered.
Looking at one of the questions you posted here, you answer yourself without accepting the answer. Not only that, but you should have been able to (and incidentally did) find the answer yourself with a bit of research.
