unanswered vs unaccepted

Question

What is SE's qualification for "unanswered"? Because many unanswered questions do actually have answers. I am guessing that by unanswered, they really mean unaccepted. meaning that the original asker never clicked the check mark to accept one of the answers as solving the problem.

It seems to me that the terminology is confusing. And focusing on the percentage of unaccepted answers is a little strange. It is almost like penalizing the answerers based on the behavior of the askers. because i think we get a lot of one-time-askers who either don't know that they need to accept an answer, or forget to log back in after a while because they don't get an email when someone comments or replies to their question. (why is that by the way?)

Answer 1

Note quite,

If you look at all of the questions in the Unanswered questions tab, you will see that none of them have any useful answers.

By useful, I mean answers which have more "This answer is useful" votes than "This answer is not useful" votes. In other words, for a question to be considered answered, it must have at least one answer with a positive vote score.

Incidentally, I have pretty much given up taking any notice of the 'accepted answer' check mark. Quite often the asker of a question has no idea whether an answer actually answers their question. In my mind, votes are all that really count.