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I've recently often witnessed the quite sad phenomenon of new (and often clueless) users trying to make themselves known by adding useless answers to already-answered questions, or to old unanswered (and often unanswerable) questions.

This is becominig increasingly common, and increasingly disturbing; the most disturbing effect is the fact that any question that receives a new answer gets bumped to home page, cluttering it even more than it already is.

How can this problem be mitigated?

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    It's not a great sign of community health that we don't have enough incoming new questions to provide new-comers a chance to get heard.
    – sysadmin1138 Mod
    Commented Nov 28, 2020 at 0:25
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    @sysadmin1138 I totally agree. But newcomers posting useless answers to old and meaningless questions is actually a problem. I'd totally like to give them better chances to be useful. But this is really something they should not do.
    – Massimo
    Commented Nov 28, 2020 at 0:28
  • This feels like something our users with enough reputation could help with. Start protecting seriously out of date questions. Since that's most of the database at this point, that's a lot of work. Anything structural would have to happen at the Staff level.
    – sysadmin1138 Mod
    Commented Nov 28, 2020 at 3:49
  • Can you show a specific example of such a 'useless' answer in context? Right now your question would be considered not answerable because not enough information is provided to answer if it were on the regular site.
    – Rowan Hawkins
    Commented Dec 8, 2020 at 0:28

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You have all the tools you need to deal with this on a case by case basis yourself.

If an answer is useless then simply downvote it.

You could also consider protecting the question to stop it from being used in a similar manner in the future.

Beyond that, there is likely little that can be done.

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