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We have questions where the OP has commented "Yes, that's it!" or something similar, especially in and then disappeared into the ether.

We have other questions where the consensus is that the answer is correct but again the OP has vanished.

Could we have a new power to mark the question as accepted? Or is there a more appropriate way around this (copy the answers to a new question marked community wiki and hit the accept?)

Just annoying to look down a list of "unanswered" questions when you check you find out they're not.

I was thinking about something like the 5 votes it takes to close, this would also be a community consensus approach.

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    The official "unanswered" list only includes things with no upvoted answer, so if it has an answer, all you need to do is upvote it to drop it off the list. Or are you manually looking for questions that aren't marked as accepted? – bwarner Feb 14 '12 at 14:29
  • Marking this declined, as these sort of feature requests have been staunchly opposed by SE in many different suggested implementations over the years as covered by the answer below. Voting is the way to mark a 'community accepted' answer. Upvote answers you think are useful/correct. Downvote the ones that are incorrect or not useful – Robotnik♦ Jul 21 at 23:58
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This particular feature has been request a few times on Meta Stack Overflow, and declined every time:

A similar, mod-only version has been suggested a couple of times as well, and was poorly received:

The reason for this is that there's supposed to be two measures of acceptance:

  • What the question asker thinks is the right answer, indicated by the checkmark.
  • What the community thinks is the right answer, indicated by having the highest number of votes.

Allowing community users to accept on behalf of the asker conflates these two acceptance concepts: the "workaround" as it were, is to just upvote what you think is the correct answer and let the regular answer sorting float what the community thinks is the correct answer to the top.

Just as an aside, the system does take into account not every question will get an accepted checkmark: when you click on any of the "unanswered" navigation tabs, the default is to show questions with no upvoted answers, not questions with no accepted answer. To get questions off the unanswered lists, just be sure to upvote the correct answer.

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