Should we be leaving comments discouraging users from answering off-topic questions?

Question

It is a bit discouraging to me when a user, especially one with high rep, answers a blatantly off-topic question. I don't at all begrudge them the rep earned by such an answer; I just feel it encourages more questions of the kind. But to each their own, I thought. People have their reasons; trying to be helpful is one of them, as is having a different opinion of what constitutes a blatantly off-topic question.

Also wanting to be helpful, I sometimes leave a comment and a link to ELL, or I'll just VTC. But sometimes I answer for my own reasons, and recently this comment appeared under such an answer:

Do you think this question is on-topic? I am curious to know why you would choose to answer a blatantly off-topic question? When you say "it really depends on the context", don't you think it is necessary to ask the Original Poster what he/she is asking?

I was a bit surprised. It doesn't feel to me that it's someone's business to tell other users what to do in so direct a manner. Knowing the commentor, though, it fit their personality, so...

But a few days later, I saw a very similar comment, also quite direct, by a different user admonishing someone else for the same thing. (It was a few days ago, and I can't remember the name to look for it. Searching by LQQ (Low Quality Question) would be too depressing.) But the tone was there, and I thought a bad example might have been set.

My question is, should this be encouraged as a way to deal with the problems we have here with LQQ? On the one hand, it's direct, and likely to make an impression on most newish users who commit this "infraction". On the other, it's kind of hostile and may create an atmosphere of rigidity.

This was addressed before in 2011, but maybe could use revisiting.

Alternatives to leaving such comments:

• consistently leave polite * comments on the answers (and wait for the slew of meta complaints)
• consistently downvote the answers, leaving a polite comment (and wait for the even greater slew of meta complaints)
• downvote the answers without comments (and wait for meta complaints we can close as duplicates)
• ignore and hope it happens with less frequency (knowing that new users always will take up the practice as they come across the site not knowing any better)
• VTC asap and hope the question gets closed before anyone answers.

Others? Suggestions? Opinions?

Edited to add: My position (which I thought was clear) is that I don't think it's my business to tell other users when and when not to post answers. I guess what isn't clear is the question, Is it anybody's business to do this? If it's not, should we flag such comments? (From the above list of options, my choices have been the last two.)

*_{It's great that you're interested in answering, but in general, answering questions that show no research (or whatever the close reason is), is discouraged on this site... please see (appropriate section of guidelines).}

Answer 1

As medica (the OP here) points out, this question has been raised before - but it was a long time ago, so I fully endorse revisiting the issue (and it's much better presented this time around!).

I should first admit that I myself have sometimes posted an answer where I probably should have posted a comment asking for clarification and/or closevoted for lack of sufficient detail/context. I enjoyed the "game" of sometimes making a lucky guess as to exactly what the OP wanted to know. But I now think that was a bad habit - not just because I could be humiliatingly wrong in my guess, but because it's counterproductive to improving the quality of (current and future) questions.

If you see someone else has commented asking for clarification and/or closevoted for lack thereof, I would urge you to think carefully before posting an answer. There's no need to rush - potentially salvageable questions are just "On Hold" for the first 48 hours, and we should give the OP time to respond through revised question text (not just comments) if we want well-presented questions.

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Of course there are plenty of Off Topic questions that are never going to be salvageable (they're inherently OT, or the OP is unable / can't be bothered to make requested improvements). Like many others, I get a bit annoyed if someone posts an answer to an OT question (not least because it hinders the closevote process), but I don't see how anyone can argue with the point made by Cerberus in the previous top-voted answer...

["punishment downvoting" is] contrary to the way the system is supposed to work, because the vote does not reflect the quality of the answer itself at all

Having said that, I've always found Kit Z. Fox♦ to be our most moderate moderator - and in that link, even she comments...

we should encourage downvotes on answers only after the question has actually been closed.

I should also mention that obviously new users don't have the rep to post an "answer as comment" to an OT question. But I assume most people are like me, in that they're only really irritated by high-rep users answering inappropriately (because they should know better).

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One final point (incisively raised in Dan Bron's comments) is that there could be advantages to both ELU and ELL if we become more "exacting" ("less friendly", if you insist) on this side. ELL is naturally more "indulgent" because many OPs there are struggling with a foreign language anyway, but here on ELU we should be primarily focused on articulate users asking interesting questions.

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TL;DR: Don't downvote correct answers to OT questions because that degrades the site itself. But keep a weather eye open for any such answers that you could feasibly downvote as "incorrect". And rather than posting snarky comments, just post a link to this very Meta question (if only to keep our dirty laundry off the main site! :)

Answer 2

Thank you for raising the question. In the meta question you linked to, the OP's accepted answer is to down-vote the answer to a poor question. However, the answer with the most up-votes advocates against it ('most' by a small margin - excluding my vote, it's 12 votes to the accepted answer's 8). In any case, answers on meta are simply opinions, so they aren't authoritative. Naturally, moderators' opinions carry more weight, but the often cited ones aren't from moderators.

To me, the issue is the intended purpose of up and down votes for answers, which the tooltips tell us is "this answer is (not) useful".

Voting down an answer one considers useful simply to protest the deficiencies of a question looks very much like an attempt to game the system, which should be on par with blindly down-voting someone's answers simply because the person is unpopular. It doesn't do justice to the answer, and it gives a false impression of that answer to later visitors. If the question is subsequently up-voted, whether because people start reading it in a different light or because it has been well edited, the answer might still be valid but its votes would be unfairly handicapped.

There is already a mechanism in place to address off-topic questions - vote to close them. To say that a useful answer hinders the closing process dismisses the possibility that the question, perhaps reframed, may not be so off-topic as to warrant closure. And if it really is that bad, the presence of answers shouldn't be regarded as a deterrent to voting to close the question.

In short, deal with questions using mechanisms that deal with questions.

It is inappropriate to discourage the posting of good answers to any question, including questions the commenter considers off-topic.

Answer 3

We don't need to comment on or downvote answers to supposedly off-topic questions because:

(1) Not everyone agrees as to whether a question is off-topic. That is why there are votes. If you think it is off-topic, vote to close.

(2) Downvotes ideally should be reserved for wrong or misleading answers, not correct answers that simply answer questions you don't like. If you don't like the post, vote to delete after closure.

Having said that, users are of course free to comment and downvote as they wish. I am sick and tired of many such comments and downvotes though, which often come from non-experts parading as experts.

As an aside, sometimes I feel that more effort is spent on policing the site (via these comments, closevotes and downvotes) than actually helping people and answering questions on English, which I believe should be the true spirit of ELU.

Answer 4

My position is that it is helpful and useful to post a comment on a question to explain why you feel the question is off-topic. Voting to close a question as off-topic goes right along with that. I would that both these things were one and the same.

Commenting on an answer to a question that you feel is off-topic to explain to the answerer that you think the question is off-topic and therefore they ought not to be answering it, well, that's presumptuous and inappropriate.

I also don't feel it is particularly necessary to downvote an answer on a question that you feel is off-topic if your only reason for downvoting is because the answer exists, not because the answer is bad or lacks research. That's not to say you should upvote it either. You could just leave it alone. However, that is up to the discretion of the voter.

That said, please don't answer questions if you think they are off-topic -- although you should feel free to post helpful advice or answers as comments to help the user, even though you voted to close the question (which I will politely assume that you did since you bothered to leave a comment about topicality). For example, I feel it's friendly and appropriate to say "We don't handle methods of patching it up with your auntie on this site, but you might try bringing her a new orchid for her garden the next time you visit" in a comment. It should not be an answer.

Answer 5

I strongly support offering polite advice to newer EL&U participants regarding the unwritten preferences of active site users and the likely consequences of disregarding them. Offering such advice has three potentially beneficial effects: (1) it sets a tone of civility in direct interactions with other users, as a model for the newcomers; (2) it conveys information about what I as an experienced site participant take to be the reality of how things work here, including information that may not be evident from the explicit formal policies of the site; (3) it combats the notion that this is a closed (and elitist) country club whose members are hostile to newcomers, by indicating that newcomers who adapt to the "unspoken rules" of the site are very welcome here.

These three enumerated benefits have the greatest chance of being effective when experienced users offer relevant advice to newish site participants, of course. The longer a person has been active here, the less likely he or she is to be ignorant of general tendencies and preferences among active users, and the more likely he or she is to have worked out a personally satisfactory balance between accommodating majority preferences and flouting them. I rarely post advisory comments about how to get along at EL&U to users with more than a few hundred rep points on this site because I figure that the advice is unlikely to be helpful to them or beneficial for the site as a whole.

I believe that most newcomers—and especially most newcomers who are likely to contribute to a stronger EL&U community—want to know what other people think they're doing wrong, if for no other reason than to be able to do it anyway from an informed position rather than from an unwitting one. If someone at my table politely informs me that I have a piece of spinach stuck in my teeth, I can decide whether to remove it or not—but at least I know that it's there; what I don't want is to be humiliated by the form of the announcement or to be left ignorant of the problem.

Answer 6

The first time I got this type of direct challenge in a comment, I told the commenter to fuck off (but not in those two words). In return I got what seemed to be a hurt and plaintive response that the intent was to make ELU a better place. This made me realize the extent to which some people care about the quality of the site (or rather their perception of its quality). I call these collected folk by the abbreviation CPVPV, and if you're a paid-up member, I think you have a duty to inform the errant answerer of your views. And I think the answerer has a reciprocal duty to take your comment seriously, which is to say, not to do what I did at first.

You say that you're discouraged by off-topic answers, and you've confined yourself to ignoring and hoping. That seems a recipe for more discouragement, and I see no reason for you not to act in good faith. I would suggest the following guidelines:

• If politeness is important to you, by all means be polite. I don't care about politesse, so I think it's importance in commentary is in inverse proportion to the reputation of the answerer to whose post you're responding.
• Downvote whatever moves you -- question, answer, or both. But leave a comment to announce what you've done. A driveby downvote (a curse upon this site) may leave readers with the impression that the answer is factually wrong, and it gives the answerer no clue as what the answer lacks.
• Don't stalk repeat offenders. If sweet reason (or bitter hectoring, for that matter) fails, and the answerer has told you about mutual irreconcilable differences, there's no point in creating a cycle of recrimination.
• Don't flag comments if you're a third party (unless, of course, the comments are abusive).

I take your point about the tone of comments creating a hostile environment and an impression of rigidity. But the train has long left that station.

Answer 7

Yes, we should leave comments discouraging users from answering off-topic questions.

No, we should not flag such comments.

If you close a question you are actually preventing people from answering it. Why would you vote to close if you think adding answers would be a good thing? Why would you keep quiet about that before or after such an answer appears?

As I'm answering a question I watch for close votes. What I'd rather see are comments telling me what's wrong. Sometimes they change my answer. Sometimes they mean the question should be edited. Sometimes they mean I should rethink answering and vote to close myself.

A comment affects my behavior far more than the close vote counter does. The counter just makes me hurry.

Answer 8

How to react to a questionable question is the most critical thing anyone acting to moderate this site can know. This defines what the site is about. I don't come here to talk about cooking.

However, our boundries are fuzzy. They will ever be so.

Questionable questions are tough to judge precisely because they are hard to understand. This means a questions quality varies from reader to reader based on the assumptions they make. Even more troubling is that the questions quality changes as it attracts answers. Answer a questionable question well and you can save it. Suddenly it's getting upvotes. Answer it badly and watch it go to pot.

It's tempting to just close everything that is questionable. No answers means the quality isn't going to change and surprise you without an edit from the OP. This can be comforting. This isn't always in the best interest of the site.

We close questions to show people what we don't consider to be good examples of questions. We don't close them because they confuse us and we don't feel like answering. Be careful of your motivations. If in doubt take the time to reread. Make a comment. Wait. A bad answer to a bad question isn't the end of the world.

To allow a moderator to feel like there is time to wait it's entirely appropriate for them to voice quality concerns in a comment. Answering a question without addressing those concerns is bad for the site. Answering a question in a way that does is good for the site.

The site is designed to make us race to answer questions. The close process actually accelerates this rather than slow down the race to answer a questionable question. This is frustrating.

Other than adding a stern label to the question, forbidding answers is precisely what closing a question does. It's understandable that a moderator, halfway through the close process, would feel frustrated seeing an answer come in anyway.

The problem is, once the answer comes in the questions quality has changed. It's not yet time to react. It's time to reread the question and answer and think about how this will look a year from now. Once you do that, start commenting and voting. If you haven't already, consider closing. Watching a questionable question attract bad answers and doing nothing is just wrong.

The key is, don't let your frustration show. Be polite and convincing. If the answer came in after a concern was raised and the answer doesn't address the concern then it is entirely valid to point that out. Just be prepared that the result might be that the answer is improved and your point is made moot. They may even edit the question. No matter how well you've memorized the sites rules you aren't god. There are things you don't understand. You can be surprised.

In the end, most visits to the site hit old answers that have long since been voted on. The process might not make you feel like it, but it's how we look in the long run that counts.

All that said, I know who this question is about. I've watched the guy for a while. He's stern and quick to judge. But I'm lazy and too forgiving. Somewhere between the two of us I think something good is happening for the site.

If I'm wrong feel free to tell me.