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I see, one of the requirements of the Beta process is to have 2.5 Answers per Question.

My question: when should i accept the best answer for a question? Is there a rule of thumb/experience about this from other SEs?

I tend to accept the best answer for a question, when it leads me to my goal. Should i let it open a little bit longer to get a more detailed Answer?

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    On the 2.5 answer requirement — there is no such requirement. If you are looking at the Area 51 stats, I would largely ignore that page in a "health report card" context. It's an old school, antiquated attempt to measure the performance of a site by the sum of its parts, but those one-size-fits-all stats weren't a terribly effective way to measure the overall health of every community. We're looking for about 150-200+ questions during the 3-week private beta. That's a much better indication of whether you're attracting enough users to become a public site. Feb 1, 2019 at 14:41

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You should answer a question as soon as it helps YOU to understand the concept, solve the question.

The idea behind the "accepted answer" is not to indicate which answer is the best solution (that's what voting is for), but to indicate which answer helped the OP (original poster=question asker) specifically.

Unfortunately, some users consider accepting an answer as the functional equivalent of closing a trouble ticket — "thank you, problem solved; nothing further needed here." This is not the case. Overall, you should try to hold off on accepting an answer as long as you can manage. It shows that questions are still open to input and encourages further collaboration and improvement. Incidentally, you can (and should) add new answers to a question with an already accepted answer if you think something is missing in the prior answers.

Also note that the 2.5 answers per question criterion is not the most important requirement. If this site succeeds to build a nontrivial repository of knowledge, it can't really fail. Read more about beta site evaluations here.

I recommend also reading these help center articles:

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