Ability to signal or flag a single post as "answer"

After reading some threads lately, i noticed this happens a lot:

There's a thread where someone is looking for answers about something, and that answer is found or after researching for some time people get to a conclussion, post it, receive stars and congrats and all that stuff, only to later have that post buried among pages and pages of offtopic posts or people saying things like "i only read the first two pages so..." and then they go and post again what has been posted 50 times already on that same thread..

So, my idea and suggestion is, can we have a feature that allows the op or a mod to signal or flag a post as the answer or explanation? And then once a post in that thread has been flagged, can it show as a link on the OP so that people who comes first time on the thread can see it and avoid the case where the answer was found on page 3 but they only read up to the third post on page 1 and then go and add a new post to page 50 with nothing but duplicated content?

I know this would be rather easy to implement, but i also realize there are other reasons why it may not be good, like people don't bothering to read or post anymore and instead just waiting for an answer to show up, less page clicks from members that actually go through the thread looking for good content and probably others.

But really, i think that would be a good addition, other sites on the web do have something like this, it helps a lot in finding answers. I don't know but it really bothers me that some threads grow to 400 pages and the explanation was on page 20 but now it is imposible to find because nobody is able to go through 400 pages and detect that single post among the hundreds of non related, flamewars, repeated posts. Lol i'm angry or something haha

Also, it would be nice if we were able to search posts on a single thread, or to organize posts by number of stars, member or number of replies, but that may be too much to ask

I actually think it is a good idea to highligt a post that answers the question and IMO a thread should be closed, to prevent the answer getting burried.

I know this happens reguraly in the board and bussines forum.

I do think an answer has to be confirmed as a fact.

Can you believe my spell error when the correct version is written in huge letters above in the screen...? lol

That is a great idea!

I can totally imagine it and see how it could help.