I thought I posted a good answer [closed]

Question

Ok so I answered a question about PHP global variables, and my answer was right to the point and solved the OP's problem. I had two upvotes and the OP accepted my answer. However, maybe 3 hours later (when the question would have been burried deep below the newer ones) I got downvoted like crazy: 5 times in less than 5 minutes.

I am quite upset about this and I am now reconsidering my knowledge about this. I don't understand why I was downvoted because I thought my answer was a good one... My answer almost comes straight from the PHP documentation about variable scope.

Can anybody tell me why I was downvoted that much? Was my answer really that terrible? Or is it due to a bug of some sort?

UPDATE: Thank you all for coming to the rescue. I hope that these behaviours will be greatly penalised because they are very inappropriate. Given the fact that my answer was good, regardless of how I demonstrated it, it does not deserve this kind of viral downvoting.

UPDATE #2 : Ok guys, I never thought that I would create such an event with this, I only wanted to know what happened and why I was so massively down voted. It was not meant to be some kind of Pleeeeeaaaase can you give back that precious reputation to me?. Sorry if it felt like that! Now I understand why my answer was downvoted and I updated it to point the OP to better practices.

Answer 1

This appears to have come from a chat discussion. I am genuinely dismayed that if somebody did think there was a problem, they didn't leave a comment. I will be having words with a few folks...

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Discussion has been had. This apparently stemmed from people trying to be proactive in quality monitoring, close-votes, delete-votes etc. I have reminded the people involved of the importance of leaving feedback (comments etc) in the case where something is questionable. And made it clear that "pile on" downvoting would be inappropriate.

In this particular case, meta has already boosted that answer a lot; now - I'm not a PHP person. For all I know there is something wrong with the answer. Or maybe there isn't - I'm not qualified to say. Maybe someone will offer better opinion than I can on the technical merits of that answer.

Answer 2

I think that this indicates a deeper problem with a lot of SO answers. The point of the site is not to help individuals, but to help the community. That's why the Not Constructive and Too Localized close-vote types exist. The power of the site is not in helping an individual, but in helping the community as a whole and providing searchable answers to help future users with similar problems. That's how this community thrives.

But that's not what this answer does. It answers the OP's question. Sure. But it does not help the OP. It says why it's happening, but not what the OP should do.

There are three ways to answer any question:

1. Answer their question
2. Solve their stated problem
3. Solve their actual problem

The best answers do all three. But to me, the third way is the most important. If often takes some insight to determine the actual problem, but the actual problem is the most useful to the community. It's the most useful in general...

The answer that's linked in this question originally (before an edit an hour ago) only solved the first way. The stated problem still existed, it was just explained why it happened.

As to the Chat Issues

I actually somewhat agree to the hate on the dv-pls tag. I think it is a bit much. It does feel like gang mentality taking root. With that said, I think it's worth mentioning that the cv-pls and delv-pls tags are really quite useful in helping moderate the site. It raises awareness on questions that really are not constructive for the site, and allows for a better community moderation to take place.

However, there are no scripts or robots. Everyone who votes is still voting for themselves and making their own decisions. Let's not forget that. It was decided a long time ago that people can down vote without leaving a comment, and that it's desired behavior. I disagree with that mentality, but the community decided that. So if that's acceptable (dv without comment), why is this any different?

Answer 3

Just to complement Marc's answer from the point of view of someone who actually has some knowledge of PHP:

The original answer (which was later edited) was correctly describing scoping in PHP, but proposed to solve the problem by importing global variables into the function. This is considered very bad practice (at least in PHP).

As such the downvoters probably decided that the answer is "not useful" (the definition of a downvote): Even though it does answer the question in some way, it proposes a very bad solution to the problem, which eventually would cause more harm than good (thus being "not useful").

I don't see any problem with downvoting such an answer and I don't see an issue with showing the answer to other people, so they can decide whether they want to downvote it too (it's their choice!)

By the way, the answer is now edited and warns about the use of globals. So now there is no reason to downvote anymore.

Answer 4

Whilst I mostly agree with ircmaxell's answer there is an element of our community who live for the self-righteous act of telling anyone and everyone "they are doing it wrong" or "that's not best practice".

Now that's fine and dandy and perhaps they're right enough. But what a lot of folk seem to forget is that a large number of developers are working in maintenance mode with code bases that cannot possibly be fixed by a complete rewrite to satisfy the pedantic expectations of righteous few - i.e. stop using global variables.

The accepted answer (in it's original form) directly "answers the question" and explains the mechanics of global variables which is the desired result, whether that fits with so-called "best practice" or not is neither here nor there.

Hijacking posts to turn them into "best-practice" flamewars is not constructive, and if the OP bloody well wants to use a global then let him/her do so; step off your high horse and find something else to answer.

In the C# world there are many classes within the framework that implement the disposable pattern and there is a typical pattern of using these classes so as to ensure early cleanup of unmanaged resources wrapped by managed code, for example:

using(UnmanagedResource res = new UnmanagedResource())
{
   // Do stuff
}

Now if a user either asks a question or posts an answer but didn't properly wrap an objects usage in the using statement we sure as hell don't go diving off the deep end yelling about "best practice", gang downvoting and generally derailing that particular question or answer. All that's needed is a polite comment pointing out the error of their ways.

This whole episode comes off as a great big Well, Actually which is sad because our community can be much better than this.

Answer 5

I was one of the people who downvoted your answer (as well as the other answer) as well as I am one of the regulars in PHP chat.

Let's start with the why: because the answer basically is wrong. I mean the answer works, but it isn't considered best practice (understatement). The use of the global keyword isn't the way to go and should be replaced by dependency injection.

The sad fact is that the [php] tag has a lot of bad practice or plain wrong answers / questions. I blame the different resources on the internet for a big part for this. Now the really sad fact is that other people see them and use them (without knowing it is wrong). One way of showing this is by downvoting questions / answers.

What happened was the following: we were discussing the question and after that saw answers coming in (with some stuff in it you should "never" do: global keyword). When we see a wrong answer we may indeed downvote. And we may indeed post a [dv-pls] with a link (this doesn't really happen that often).

I should say that [dv-pls] is not a: hey guys look at this, downvote the h*ll out of it. It is rather a way of getting an answer / question in the spotlight for review. All people in chat (who want to) will review it and do with it whatever they want. They may even start a discussion which may convert a downvote to a neutral vote / upvote. Again everyone decides for themselves what somebody does with it.

The only thing what somebody could have done was post a comment on your answer to say what was wrong. Although this is not mandatory you will see that most times a comment will be posted.

People can call bad names on us, however the fact is that we are trying to make this site better by making sure the best answers get the most attention. So imho calling us a jerk circle or whatever isn't really the way to go.

So in conclusion:

First let it be clear it was nothing personal against you. Simply because the answer was wrong in the sense that when other people would use it they would be doing it wrong. It's too bad that no comment was left on the answer (which as you can see is something that will happen most of the time). IMHO the [cv-ring] has it's place here given the cleaning up we have done on this site. But again it was not a: "all forces attack!!!" type of thing, but rather that some people thought the answer wasn't correct and acted on it accordingly.

It was not meant to be some kind of Pleeeeeaaaase can you give back that precious reputation to me?

I didn't think it was. But rather you wanted to know why all the downvotes which is a valid question. If you (or anybody else) have any more questions feel free to join the php chat room and you will see we are not the army of downvote fanatics ;) you people think we are. :-)

Answer 6

It surprises me that SO people would sacrifice the quality of the site as a resource to protect the feelings of someone who is giving poor advice. If I post a terrible answer I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion. If there's no penalty for bad answers, you'll have lots of bad answers. It's that simple.