Whose choice is accepting an answer?

Question

As far as I can tell, across the SE network, according to each site's help center on the topic, the accepted answer is chosen by the OP as most helpful / informative to the asker.

I asked a question: Why doesn't the Enter key send EOL?

and got two great answers:

• one, written by Thomas Dickey, an author of xterm and many unix applications and utilities, which directly and clearly answers my question.

• another, written by Nominal Animal, which is far less of a direct answer and more very helpful information to someone writing, for instance, a poor man's libreadline, which I am.

Nominal Animal wants me to change the accepted answer on the basis theirs is Not An Answer, and doesn't attempt to answer the question. I don't believe this to be the case, but I'm afraid Nominal will delete their answer.

I believe the correct thing to do is not waver in my choice of acceptance, but my question for meta is twofold:

1. is what I believe the correct thing to do, actually correct?

2. Can a Moderator prevent Nominal from deleting their answer? I think it's quite valuable.

Answer 1

What answer you accept is completely up to you. You should accept the one which you, personally, found most helpful. If that isn't the one you would consider objectively "best", so be it.

Accepted answers can only be deleted by mods so there's no danger of Nominal Animal deleting the answer you've accepted. Answers on the SE sites are publicly licensed and no longer belong to their authors once posted. In some cases, mods will even undelete answers whose posters have deleted them if they feel that they are useful to the site. Now, if the poster feels it is a horrible answer and asks you to please unaccept so they can delete, you can choose to do so, or not, but it's completely up to you.

So, yes, what you believe is indeed correct and no moderator intervention is needed; accepted answers cannot be deleted.