There are no dumb answers!

Question

Following on from the recent "no dumb questions" thread, I've noticed a worrying trend of some users downvoting and writing belittling comments against answers that they believe should have been comments. This can be particularly off-putting for new users to the forum. At the end of the day, does it matter if it's an answer or comment?

Answer 1

There is a slight point to the complaints about answers versus comments. If a topic has an answer it will appear in green in the overview instead of red. People scanning the list for unanswered topics to help with may then miss it, even though the "answer" in question doesn't actually answer the question.

That said, it's much better to tell the user writing an answer when they should have written a comment something like the above than just yelling "That should be a comment!" since most people won't understand what the fuzz is about and won't like the tone.

Answer 2

In general a downvoting is not good.

Just be polite: answer or leave it.

Answer 3

Politeness is the key to a successful community. We geocachers in the PGC community should do our best to avoid down voting both questions and answers. We may be discouraging new users from participating in the community support.

Answer 4

There IS visible difference between answer and comment in the word meaning, appearance, content and length. You can have a look at the most answers addressing the questions and to the answers saying just "Good idea", "Thank you", "It worked".

Most of the points were already given by pinkunicorn. As already said in the linked question, the downvote is the last thing to do. I am adding explanatory comment in these cases. If you have more polite comment, please add it. If you do not agree, feel free to comment on the cases where do you think that it is answer.

The baseline is not set in the stone, nor what cases should be handled how. The common understanding in this among most of the users is crucial to handle the cases systematically, ensure some order in this QA and make the site helpful for all the users, not just a dumping area for "It worked" "answers".

Answer 5

If only people were nicer sometimes..