0

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?

4
  • 2
    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
    Nov 28, 2020 at 0:25
  • 1
    @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
    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 Start protecting seriously out of date questions.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
    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. Dec 8, 2020 at 0:28

1 Answer 1

2

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.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .