Forum improvement

I think you could tag a moderator when you found the answer to your own question. That way, he or she could mark your question as answered.

Perhaps "best answer" can still be used but you don't get the points if you had asked the question. This way we don't need a new thing and you don't get points for helping yourself.

I think that there does need to be a better way to know if people still need help or not. Sometimes questions have been sufficiently answered and are never awarded "best answer". So you still end up having to click through questions with answers to see if it still needs a better answer.

Perhaps there could be a new filtering category like "unanswered" called something like "still need help". You could tag your own question with this only after some time has passed and you have received at least 1 answer. This might cut down on people re-posting their question and also make it easier for people helping to know who really needs help. I think to be useful it would have to expire automatically though. It would be up to the OP to re-tag their question if necessary.

Sorry Chris, I think I'm getting off topic here.

To get back to your question, I do think you should be able to mark your answer as "best answer". If you managed to solve your own problem then don't you feel that your answer was the best answer? It seems like it would be by definition. I think though that if someone else came along after the fact and gave you an even better answer than what you came up with then you should switch your "best answer"