It is an interesting idea, but given the proportion of SoPW nodes where it can never be applied (i.e. all those from years past, along with all the new ones posted by AnonyMonk), it might end up causing enough confusion to offset the "advantage" of reducing the number of "thank you" replies; e.g. newcomers basing their first impressions on a superficial review will wonder why so many nodes don't seem to get "solved".

(I'm not sure I understand the objection that some monks have against people posting a sub-reply saying "thanks, this has fixed my problem". Sure it may be unnecessary, but where's the harm to the Monastery? If such replies are "wasting valuable node space", why does PM retain useless replies to the "opinion poll" nodes? What makes those more valuable than "thank you" replies?)

I suppose there could be some risk that monks who are just trying to be helpful might see "SOLVED" in the SoPW title and decide to skip over the node -- and thereby kill any chance that they might be able to post a better solution, or learn something from the solution(s) already posted.

OTOH, the most effective users of the site will simply learn to ignore this sort of label, because they know there's a chance they might be able to post a better solution, or at least learn something from the solution(s) already posted.

Either way, I'd tend to conclude that putting "SOLVED" labels on nodes is unlikely to yield enough of a positive payoff to justify the effort of encouraging and supporting it.

Now, if the (non-AM) OP-owner of a given SoPW thread had the ability to add some flag to the titles of replies that were especially helpful, this might be a nice touch that could reduce or even eliminate those nasty little "thank you" replies...

(I'm not sure what sort of flag would be suitable, and I assume this sort of facility would require a relatively complicated patch, and would simply pose another challenge to newcomers who already need to ramp up on a lot of PM-specific administrivia. So forget I even mentioned this.)

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