How can we handle orphaned questions?

Question

I was browsing through some questions and came across one where the user doesn't seem to be part of the site anymore. There are also some questions where the users don't seem to have returned to the site after posting the question. In most of these cases, there are quite a few relevant and well voted answers, but no accepted answer as the original questioner has not returned to the site.

So, is there any way we can handle such cases? Of course, there may be situations where there is no clear cut answer, and all the answers taken together have a value of their own. However, having an accepted answer can improve the information one could be looking for, and some way to revive\re-assign orphaned questions might provide some additional useful responses. The bounty system could be used for this purpose I guess, but is there any better way?

Answer 1

Votes show the opinion of community. Accepted answer shows what the person who actually had the problem found most useful, even if it disagrees with community opinion. If that person is no longer available, all we have is community opinion and that is already expressed by votes (with highest-voted answer on top). An "accept" given by somebody else would dilute meaning of acceptance on questions that actually were accepted by original poster.