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Occasionally, in the 10k flag queue, one sees a self-answer that should really be an edit to the original question. For a while, I just re-flagged these as "not an answer" and moved on. But more recently, I thought that perhaps I should edit the question to include the answer's content, saving ♦ mods a step.

Today, I did so, and when I happened to look at the question again, I saw that not only had a ♦ mod deleted the answer, he or she had also edited the question, resulting in a duplication of content in the answer.

Obviously this was not a big deal, since I caught it -- I just re-edited the question. But I might not always catch this kind of thing, which makes me think that perhaps I shouldn't be editing questions in this case. Is there a one-click solution to this problem available to ♦ mods? Am I really saving them any work in these cases? If not, shouldn't I leave the editing to them, to avoid this kind of minor mishap?

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    Pretty sure there's a one-click "convert to edit" button if it's the Asker answered and got a Not An Answer flag
    – Ben Brocka
    Jul 5, 2012 at 13:42

2 Answers 2

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Moderators do have a one-click "convert to edit" button on the moderator dashboard that shows up on self-answered posts that are flagged as "not an answer," so that's probably the preferred way to deal with it. If you feel like editing the content yourself, just flag as "other" and fill in a message telling us "follow-up content moved to question" or something similar so we don't double edit the question, but know to just delete the non-answer.

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Flag the answer as not an answer.
Moderators can append the answer to the question with just two clicks, if who posted the answer is the same user who posted the question.

screenshot

In the case the user has two accounts (one used for asking the question, and one used to post the answer), moderators could merge those accounts, if necessary.

From my personal experience on Drupal Answers, in most of the cases a user is posting an edit for the question as answer because there more than one account involved, which normally means two unregistered accounts.

If you notice the user who posted the answer is the same user who posted the question (even thought the accounts are different, but using the same avatar), and the answer is really an edit for the question, you could flag the answer with a custom reason, explaining what you noticed. The "not an answer" flag is generic, and it could get the answer to be deleted, instead of being merged in the question.

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