The Forum interface needs to be improved.

When responding to someone's Forum question, you can either "Post Answer" or "Add Comment" to a question. This is creating a problem because many people are supplying perfectly good answers under "Comments", but the question is being reported as "Unanswered".

The idea, as best I can guess, is that "Add Comments" are intended for "non-answers" like clarifying the question being asked by the OP.

Then I assume once you have an answer, you are supposed to give it through the "Post Answer" form at the bottom of the page.

The problem is that many people supply good answers under "Add Comment". It's a problem for several reasons. Answers supplied that way can't be voted on, and can't be marked as "Best answer" by the person who asked the question. They aren't registered as "Answers" either, which means the question shows up as having "0 answers". So if I'm searching for questions that haven't been answered yet by looking for questions with "0 answers", many actually do have answers. Plus people who are participating don't have the chance to get awarded points for answering the question, not realizing they didn't use the right response form.

This needs to be fixed to improve the overall experience for everyone.

MY SUGGESTION: Allow the person who asked the question the ability to convert a comment as an "Answer", and have that added to the answer count for the thread, so the question is no longer being listed as "unanswered". If the OP marks it as an "answer", give the OP the ability to mark it as a "Best Answer", just like normal "Answer" posts.