The major misunderstanding is that SO exists to help the question author first. It is not an IRC. The most value comes from googling a topic and getting existi

The major misunderstanding is that SO exists to help the question author first. It is not an IRC. The most value comes from googling a topic and getting existing answers on SO. In other words, perhaps in your very specific case, your question is not XY problem but for the vast majority of visitors from google it won't be so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem Personally, I always answered SO from at least two perspectives: how the question looks for someone coming from google and how the author might interpret it.