I've run into this situation a couple of times, where people give an "answer" that basically repeats the problem in the original question. (Not going to give examples here obviously, but it's happened.) So a hypothetical example might be a question like:     I've noticed that addition overflows just get wrapped around in x86. Why?   and a hypothetical non-answer might be something like:     x86 naturally wraps around addition overflows in numbers, just like MIPS and other architectures. You need to be careful when performing arithmetic; check the carry/overflow flags to see if something overflowed.   On the one hand, this doesn't answer the question. But on the other hand, it's well-written (no specific quality issues), and it seems to answer the question.  Should an answer like this be flagged? (Sometimes commenting doesn't help, since there's just no response.)
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What is the "Not an Answer" flag and what is its purpose? When should I use this flag? When should I not use this flag? But I'm still not sure if I'm using the flag correctly... An answer is "Not an Answer", but the flag was declined or disputed!   See also:
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Checking the moderator tools this morning I see 60 not-an-answer flags out of which only a several I could agree with. The rest were just bad answers, wrong answers or lazy answers.  The way I understand from experience, is that an answer is not-an-answer if the contents of the post cannot be interpreted as an attempt to answer the question. This usually means that the answer post amounts to asking a question to the poster's own problem, asking for clarification, spam etc.   However, the description for the flag says:     This was posted as an answer, but it does not answer the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.   Does not answer the question. To me (and apparently to many others, even ) that says a very different thing that the flag should be used for. Technically incorrect answers do not answer the question but they are still answers, though low quality. Low quality vague suggestions don't really answer the question but they are still answers. Not-an-answer flags for these have typically been declined.  In my opinion, these type of answers should just be downvoted until the poster naturally deletes it themselves (or 3 trusted users vote deletion) and everyone gains their reputation back.  So my question is, should the not-an-answer flag description be clarified seeing as there is so much noise being generated?  Here are some examples:   - lazy/bad/wrong answer.  - ditto  - ditto    My question is different from . I flat out just want to change the flag description and not require people to read that post in meta or get their flags declined to understand how the flag should be used.
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Question: Can you provide an example of a claim where the base case holds but there is a subtle flaw in the inductive step that leads to a fake proof of a clearly erroneous result? [Note: Please do not answer with the very common  example.]  Comment: Sometimes inductive arguments can lead to controversial conclusions, such as the ,  and a host of other paradoxes. However, I am interested in examples of a more mathematical nature (as opposed to linguistic) where the inductive argument is subtly flawed and leads to erroneous conclusions.   Note: If you provide an answer, please do so in a way similar to how current answers are displayed (gray out the flaw so people can be challenged to discover it).
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I know, the question seems to be strange. Programmers sometimes think too much. Please read on... In C I use signed and unsigned integers a lot. I like the fact that the compiler warns me if I do things like assigning a signed integer to an unsigned variable. I get warnings if I compare signed with unsigned integers and much much more. I like these warnings. They help me to keep my code correct. Why don't we have the same luxury for floats? A square-root will definitely never return a negative number. There are other places as well where a negative float value has no meaning. Perfect candidate for an unsigned float. Btw - I'm not really keen about the single extra bit of precision that I could get by removing the sign bit from the floats. I'm super happy with floats as they are right now.  I'd just like to mark a float as unsigned sometimes and get the same kind of warnings that I get with integers. I'm not aware of any programming language that supports unsigned floating-point numbers. Any idea why they don't exist?  EDIT: I know that the x87 FPU has no instructions to deal with unsigned floats. Lets just use the signed float instructions. Misuse (e.g. going below zero) could be considered undefined behaviour in the same way as overflow of signed integers is undefined.
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Today I came across an OBVIOUSLY good answer in /review. It had 7 upvotes, contained lists, paragraphs of explanation, and well-applied sample code. It was also moderately long. How does a question like this get flagged for review? I don't really know how the algorithm works.   If this is low-quality then I feel bad about all of my answers.  Here's a  if you care to see it in context. It's not really a huge problem (as Bart's comment emphasizes), but this seems like an extreme outlier in every measurable aspect.
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I've been seeing this for a while now, especially on the  tag.  A user will ask a question (usually very simple, and mostly a duplicate of older questions. But that's for another day).  The user will get one or more answers that successfully answer the question. A little bit later, usually around 5-10 minutes but can be more, another user or users will come along (mostly low rep users) and post the exact same solution, sometimes changing the wording a bit, but sometimes being lifted word for word from the other answer(s).  This is slightly different from the Fastest gun in the west problem. I have nothing against answers posted in very quick succession that solve the problem. The ones I'm talking about are answers posted long after the first correct solution, that say the same thing.  A good example of this is available . All three answers say the same thing. One offers code + explanation (first answer), the second one (three minutes later) offers only code and the third one (a full eighteen minutes later) offers only a text answer.  How should answers like this be dealt with? They are adding nothing of value to the community, as the problem has already been answered. The person posting the answer could not have run into the "The other and I posted the answer so close to each other we didn't know about duplicates until after posting" problem, as there is an eighteen minute gap.   is another example.
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Sine a major goal of SO is to compile the best programming questions and answers on the internet, I'm wondering if there's more we can do to single out and/or correct cases where questions or answers contain exploitable code (see  which includes an sql injection vulnerability). I always try to point this out to authors, but I tend not to make edits so I don't change "the meaning" of the author.   One approach for this I though of was to create a special flag to be added to questions or answers noting that the included code or advice is unsafe. Alternatively, is it better to follow a hard "edit out" approach in these cases?
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Question (since closed and deleted): . I know about the  of VLQ flags, and I can't fathom why anyone would think that question wouldn't be a candidate for removal.  Question text, for posterity:     Hey I want a Cyrus beck line algorithm program in c or c++. I have   searched a lot but hadn't got anything over Web..!!      If anyone of you have Program please give it to me and help me out.      Thank you in advance :)   I find  not compelling because it requires me to accept the premise that this question was not "unlikely to be salvageable".
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Take a look at . It's a really crappy question that (especially for the first revision) really deserves its -4 score.  However, one user has written what (to me, who doesn't know jack about Objective C) looks like a great answer, tutorial style.  Knowing nothing about the topic, I can't really judge this or do anything about it, but I just feel bad that the answerer has gone through some lengths to write up a (seemingly) good answer for a question that hardly anybody will ever look at. I can't even upvote the answer, because I don't know if it's good.  One idea that I had was a "Flag for pro attention" kind of thing that make the question show up in some lists for people that are active in the particular tag(s). However, I think things like that have been discussed before, and not really come to a conclusion. I myself can't think of a good way to accomplish this.  But I also don't want to leave this question rotting there. So how would you handle this  and similar cases?
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Consider the question   Asymptotic notation questions have been pretty standard for Stack Overflow.  This fairly interesting beginner question is up, but has already accumulated a couple of 'close' votes.  One of them is for 'off topic' but, possibly because I'm a theory guy, it seems very much on topic for programming and related topics.  You could argue for "computer science" potentially, but it would seem this, like questions on, oh, NP-complete problems and such, are things serious professional programmers should know and are interested in.  You could also make a case for mathematics and event the theory stack, although it's probably a little light for theory.  But with all of these separate categories, there seems to me to be a real risk that interesting questions will be modded/closed/moved until the OP loses interest.  Perhaps we've gotten a little too compartmentalized?
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In several modern programming languages (including C++, Java, and C#), the language allows  to occur at runtime without raising any kind of error condition.  For example, consider this (contrived) C# method, which does not account for the possibility of overflow/underflow.  (For brevity, the method also doesn't handle the case where the specified list is a null reference.)    //Returns the sum of the values in the specified list. private static int sumList(List&lt;int&gt; list) {     int sum = 0;     foreach (int listItem in list)     {         sum += listItem;     }     return sum; }   If this method is called as follows:  List&lt;int&gt; list = new List&lt;int&gt;(); list.Add(2000000000); list.Add(2000000000); int sum = sumList(list);   An overflow will occur in the sumList() method (because the int type in C# is a 32-bit signed integer, and the sum of the values in the list exceeds the value of the maximum 32-bit signed integer). The sum variable will have a value of -294967296 (not a value of 4000000000); this most likely is not what the (hypothetical) developer of the sumList method intended.  Obviously, there are various techniques that can be used by developers to avoid the possibility of integer overflow, such as using a type like Java's , or the  keyword and  compiler switch in C#.  However, the question that I'm interested in is why these languages were designed to by default allow integer overflows to happen in the first place, instead of, for example, raising an exception when an operation is performed at runtime that would result in an overflow.  It seems like such behavior would help avoid bugs in cases where a developer neglects to account for the possibility of overflow when writing code that performs an arithmetic operation that could result in overflow.  (These languages could have included something like an "unchecked" keyword that could designate a block where integer overflow is permitted to occur without an exception being raised, in those cases where that behavior is explicitly intended by the developer; C# actually .)  Does the answer simply boil down to performance -- the language designers didn't want their respective languages to default to having "slow" arithmetic integer operations where the runtime would need to do extra work to check whether an overflow occurred, on every applicable arithmetic operation -- and this performance consideration outweighed the value of avoiding "silent" failures in the case that an inadvertent overflow occurs?  Are there other reasons for this language design decision as well, other than performance considerations?
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I came across  in the review queue. Sometimes I come across questions of similar form. My thought is to vote to close as "too-broad" because:   Question is very broad, there are many, many ways to perform that task. No code was posted, no specific coding problem was identified.   But, and this is in general, I always get tripped up when I see that these questions have a reasonable accepted answer: I would have voted it too-broad immediately had I seen the question pop up in the new questions stream; but when I see that the answerer seemed to find the question clear enough (and his answer was accepted and deemed satisfactory), I end up going back and thinking "if it was clear enough for the answerer to provide a specific answer, doesn't that mean it wasn't too broad after all?"  How should I handle questions like this?   And, in general, how should I handle questions that, alone, seem too broad, but when answered, seem specific? Should I ignore the answers when considering closing a question, or do they retroactively change the quality of the question?
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I might want to answer my own question because:  I arrived at a solution before there were any other correct answers or I like mine better, can I still answer my own question?  I have a folder with lists of code snippets for things I always forget or get wrong, such as regular expressions for processing XML, common WinForms control idioms, etc. Is it considered poor etiquette for Stack Overflow to ask a question I already know the answer to, and then self answer, just so it gets recorded on the website?   Related:          For more information, see &quot;&quot; in the .
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I don't know how many of you have experienced the  principle when posting questions on SO, but I know I have on a few occasions. And then I just discard my question. So here's the question:  Should we go ahead and post the question?  Of course if it's something stupid like forgetting a semicolon, etc., I would say no... but there are several occasions, like if a data structure doesn't make sense, that at least someone would eventually benefit from the question/answers.  And if you should ask the question, how would you recommend choosing an answer for it?
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This is a question which started off with a , then turned into an , and now it's a question in its own right (as suggested by Jeff). I'm not sure where it could go from here :)  It's obvious that different people cast downvotes for different reasons. (Upvotes are less controversial, generally.) Here are some possible reasons:   Answer is wrong Answer is misleading (may be technically accurate, but will lead to readers making mistakes) Answer doesn't match the question (e.g. a C# answer to a question about Java) Answer doesn't really address the question, e.g. suggesting a completely different solution, even if the question specifies that there are good reasons why the current approach has to be followed Answer is okay, but not as good as another one which currently has fewer votes Answer appears to be plagiarised from existing answers. Answer is by someone I don't like. Answer is abusive (profanity, spam etc). No reason, I just felt like it. I'm a , and prefer down to up. Have you considered down? Ideological grounds: answer suggests a technology I don't like, or expresses a negative opinion of a technology I do like   Personally I go with 1, 2 and 8 - although I'll add comments suggesting changes in various other situations.  Have I missed anything? What do you do, and why? What are the net benefits (to you, the world in general, and the answerer) from your approach?
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You have to compile a file twice to get the desired output in the accepted answer to .  The accepted answer to  provides a way to avoid compiling multiple times.  My question is, what are those situations where you have to compile a file more than once? (We know of at least two such situations with reference to the linked questions.)
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I posted a question somewhere that said...     Can anyone tell me how I can solve this?   ...but someone edited it to...      Can anyone tell me how can I solve this?    ...and it was accepted.  That's wrong isn't it? Can someone explain how that's wrong?