Marking my own answer as resolved made it disappear. Why?

Posted on July 5, 2021

Confused noob here. I thought I had an answer for an ancient question. I posted it. After it was approved I saw a “resolved” link below the answer. I clicked that. Now my answer is gone. In its place is only “This answer has been marked as resolved by bobstein.” Clicking “SHOW ANSWER” next to that scrolls to the top of the window, but my answer is still hidden.

A link to my answer:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-to-view-droplet-s-memory-usage?answer=70118

What does the “resolved” link below an answer do?
Where did my answer go?
What should I do now? Wait for someone to approve something? Resubmit my answer and not click “resolve” this time?

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Matt Cowley

July 5, 2021

Accepted Answer

Hey @bobstein,

To explain what ‘Resolved’ is/does:

The ‘Resolved’ functionality on comments and answers is designed for folks to use when they’ve posted something, say a follow-up issue/question on a post, that has subsequently been resolved.

Community members often use it in exactly that context, posting a follow-up clarifying question as a comment on a question itself, and then marking the thread as resolved once the information has been given, for example.

We also often use it on tutorials when folks post questions/comments with feedback on the tutorial itself, and we’ll mark those as resolved once we’ve made a change to the tutorial to fix the issue pointed out.

This functionality is also available on answers as they’re a subset of a comment, but are less used, though may make sense to use if you want to hide an answer but not completely remove it.

To explain where your answer is:

Your answer is still there, don’t worry – it’s just hidden as you marked it as resolved. At some point in the past I believe there was functionality to be able to expand a hidden/resolved comment/answer, hence the ‘show answer’ button, but this appears to no longer be the case.

I’ve manually unresolved your answer so that it is visible once again :)

- Matt.