Recommended answers are selected by subject matter experts who have been designated as Recognized Members of a collective (or by the collective's Admins). They are a way for a collective to provide a stamp of approval on answers to questions about its area of practice. Along with upvoted answers and accepted answers, recommended answers can help users quickly and easily identify the best solution to a question by highlighting which answer, from that collective's perspective, is the preferred one.
There are two types of recommended answers: explicit and implicit.
An answer is explicitly recommended when a Recognized Member or Admin of the collective has chosen to mark an existing answer (that was not authored by an RM or Admin) as the collective's "recommended" answer to the question. In this case, the label "Answer recommended by [Collective name]" will be displayed above the answer.
Alternatively, if a Recognized Member or Admin reviews the existing answers on a question and determines that none of them are worthy of being endorsed, they may write their own, resulting in an implicitly recommended answer. This answer is considered to be recommended on the basis that it was provided by a user who could otherwise recommend answers on the collective's behalf.
In this case, the label "Recognized by [Collective name]" (or "[Collective name] Employee", where applicable) will be displayed below the author's user card at the bottom of the answer. This label will remain associated with the answer even if the user is no longer an RM/Admin in the future. This only applies to answers provided while the user is an RM/Admin, not to answers they provided before gaining that status.
A question can have only one explicitly recommended answer, but may have multiple implicitly recommended answers. Having an implicitly recommended answer does not prevent a different answer from being marked as explicitly recommended in the future.
When filtering the collective's questions for those that have a recommended answer, both implicitly and explicitly recommended answers will be displayed.