[fhood]

Also there seems to be no problem with users who submit opinions instead of answers.

Q: How do I do X extremely specific thing that I need because I have an unusual case that needs this specific thing.

A (top voted): Why would you want to do X? You shouldn't do that. I clearly know more about your problem than you do because I assume everyone on here is a college student and not a developer working with a large mostly static codebase. You should do Y instead. It is much better.

[nt8eo923nt45]

I find this disingenuous. It is a very common scenario that a new user knows of some way to solve some part of their question (or just thinks they do), and assumes the best/easiest/fastest/safest/whatever answer involves using that technique. This is exactly the scenario that Alex Papadimoulis referred to in his blog post[1] that I have to believe was the inspiration for his site The Daily WTF[2]:

> "A client has asked me to build and install a custom shelving system. I'm at the point where I need to nail it, but I'm not sure what to use to pound the nails in. Should I use an old shoe or a glass bottle?" >...[potential answers] >b) There is something fundamentally wrong with the way you are building; you need to use real tools.

The answerer is often telling the person, what you are trying to do sounds like a really bad/inefficient/ineffective/whatever solution. The common way to solve this is Y because of reasons A, B, and C. Are you doing something where those reasons are not a concern?

[1] https://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/408925 [2] http://thedailywtf.com

[fhood]

I have no problem with alternate solutions, but for gods sake, at least answer the original question as well.

[kristianc]

This seems to be a common thing across all online support communities, even ones where the software company has outsourced support to their community. I'd love to see a solution to it, as it makes discussions incredibly frustrating to read.

[fhood]

I have a solution. If a user repeatedly does that without also providing a solution to the original question then ban them.

[shagie]

In the world of “stack overflow is unfriendly to new users”, banning a person providing an answer that other people have found helpful seems to be a suggestion that would take SO in the direction of yahoo answers.

Stack Overflow’s approach appears to be all answers are acceptable. This isn’t just for the person who asked the question but everyone else too.

If a person is not providing good answers and people are down voting those poor answers, there is an automatic answer ban in place... but that requires people to down vote poor answers.

[kristianc]

No. SO absolutely can be opinionated about what constitutes a good and a bad answer. SO's job is to get to the right and most helpful answer fast. You can't always rely on the community to root out bad actors.

[shagie]

The mechanism that SO uses for sorting answers is community votes. That poor or incorrect answers get up votes is a problem. SO only has its community to do that sorting. The corporate and diamond mods have specifically stepped away from doing this except in the most egregious and disruptive cases.

[slavik81]

Be the change you want to see in the world. Downvote bad answers. Upvote good ones.