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I'm referring to a rather specific class of "answers" that people post, but it is happening frequently enough now that it's generating a lot of crap "answers" and is starting to annoy me somewhat.

For example, this answer is effectively a "me too" answer. This is not only unhelpful in that it creates extra and unnecessary noise in the answers, but people see this behaviour and might get the impression this is normal behaviour and do the same for other questions.

What I propose is a new flag reason for answers called "Pointless Answer" that with enough votes would delete the post, but not penalise the user for it. I don't feel any of the current flag options are appropriate for this type of "answer", and I don't believe it warrants negative reputation like (I believe) the current flags do.

Thoughts?

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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The Meta sites now have Pointless/Noise as a reason to close a question; sure makes sense to apply that to non-answers too.

0

I usually just flag as SPAM. While it technically isn't SPAM, in the commercial advertising sense, it is SPAM in the sense that it doesn't add any value to the question or site.

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  • Flagging as spam does have the benefit of getting the flag in front of more eyeballs (>10k rep users) to possibly get it deleted, but is that an abuse of the system? I guess my question more is: do the SE mods want the spam flag to be used for real bonafide spam or can it be used for this sort of thing as well? I'm all in favor of using it for pointless/noise answers, but just want to be sure we don't run afoul of the way the site is meant to be run.
    – EEAA
    Commented Dec 16, 2010 at 15:20
  • I was under the impression that the "Spam" flag has ramifications further than just deleting the answer, such as -100 reputation and possibly sanctions. The "Not an answer" reason I propose would just blow the post away without any negative effects. Naturally if a user were getting loads of these flags I'd expect consequences, but that would be at a moderators discretion.
    – Ben Pilbrow
    Commented Dec 16, 2010 at 20:52
  • Don't flag these as spam. It's the wrong flag and has ramifications, as Ben mentions.
    – user162327
    Commented Jun 25, 2017 at 0:26

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