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I asked about this in the fairly early days of SO [1]. Nowadays, it's clear that you're not just answering the OP, but thousands of other people. I think that
by gavinpc 11y ago
I asked about this in the fairly early days of SO [1]. Nowadays, it's clear that you're not just answering the OP, but thousands of other people. I think that's worth taking into consideration.
> Question askers should probably include a line about whether their happy for the premise to be rejected or not
This is a good alternative to being too hard-lined one way or the other.
[1] http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/45536/on-answering-the-actual-question http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/45536/on-answering-t...
- ant6n 11y agoExactly because others will come from Google to get an answer to the question is the reason why answerers should actually answer the question. Often somebody will write something like "How do you solve X? --- I'm trying to do A and encountered this problem, so how do I solve X?" And then the people will tell the user how to solve A without solving X. Except that everybody else will come from Google looking how to solve X, and that's infuriating. I also don't quite get how Stackoverflow is so accepting of people talking down on others in this way. Like if somebody asks "Can a near-zero floating value cause a divide-by-zero error?" and the best rated answer is "Floating point division by zero is not an error." (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12114498/can-a-near-zero-floating-value-cause-a-divide-by-zero-error/12114665 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12114498/can-a-near-zero-...)