Newly opened accounts often ask questions about SEO. Since they are new accounts, I try to give long and clear answers as much as I can.
But after new users ask their questions, they don't even enter the forum again. For this reason, they do not mark the correct answer options.
My question is, if moderators think it is the right answer after a certain period of time, can they choose it as the right answer?
If not, I think such a feature should be added.
Moderators do not currently have the ability to select the accepted answer for a question on behalf of a user. See this very similar discussion on Meta Stack Exchange. There are arguments for and against:
Moderators accepting answers on user's behalf after a certain time period
I understand that it can be frustrating to write up a great answer and then wait forever as the asker does not mark any answer as accepted. I've experienced that a lot too across multiple stack exchange sites. However I don't believe that we as mods are able to do a whole lot about it.
In any case such a feature would require engineering work, so it's not something we have direct control over as mods.
If you are an extrinsically motivated person looking for 15 reputation points from the Accepted Answer, don't put high expectations on it. It is a reputation-free privilege reserved for the question creator, A.K.A. original poster (OP). On the other hand, your answers could get upvotes and bounties from any community member having the corresponding privileges.
Based on the behavior shown by the CM Team previous to the recent layoff, there might be more chances to get a reputation from participation in the experiment to allow low-rep users to upvote and downvote.
I lean more toward requesting a different feature to implement something like Recognized Members and Recommended Answer like the features of the same name on Stack Overflow Collectives. There might be several strong supporting claims for something like this on a site like Webmasters.
I'm a mod and prolific answerer on a sister site, Web Applications SE. As a community member, I have the same frustration directly as I have written a lot of answers not being accepted and, in many cases, not getting a single reaction, no vote, no comments.
As of October 26, 2023, I have 547 answers on Web Applications SE with a score of 0 and have not been accepted. This doesn't include answers that were deleted i.e., because the parent question was deleted by the automatic deletion of abandoned questions, among other reasons.
Please don't take the above in the wrong way. I haven't seen your answers; I'm not implying that my answers on a sister site might be comparable with yours in any way; it's just to present some data to support my claim of feeling frustrated by not getting some of my answers accepted. It's frustrating to know that accepting an answer is a reputation-free privilege, reserved to the question creator, but that is how this feature is intended to work.
Some of the questions I have answered have been bumped by Community user multiple times, some more than ten times. As a mod, I feel frustrated by the perverse incentives, but that is something to develop on Meta Stack Exchange, not here.
As mentioned in the answer by one of the local mods, on Meta Stack Exchange, it was requested that mods select an answer as the accepted answer. I'm afraid this will never happen, but the good news is that other options are being explored.
In Stack Overflow, there are Collectives. Collectives have Recognized Members, and they can mark answers as Recommended Answer.
Stack Exchange sites always will have questions from passersby, aka hit-and-run users. We could do nothing about that other than understand how Stack Exchange works. One thing to highlight: some sites allow questions from unregistered users.
In the meantime, if that feature or something else is implemented, the best that we can do as answerers is to write thinking to help a large audience, not only the OP.
As users who have earned the privileges to upvote, downvote, etc, we could help our fellows' morale and the Community health by adopting the following mantra: Vote early, vote often.
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