Reduce posting of "linking hit-and-runs" answers

Question

For a background of the problem, see this other question.

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Feature Proposal

This feature proposal is reduce posting of "linking hit-and-runs" answers.

An answer is a "linking hit-and-run" if links occupy >= 15% of the body and the character count if lower or equal to 200.

If an answer is qualified as a "linking hit-and-run", one of the following actions could be implemented:

• Warning Only: Warn the user that his answer is a "linking hit-and-run" and considered bad etiquette on this website to post that kind of answer and that posting such answer might incur negative reputation for that very reason.

• Warning and CW: Warn the user that his answer is a "linking hit-and-run" and that it will be marked as community wiki unless he adds more body content. If the user decides to post the answer anyway, the answer is marked community wiki and no reputation is gained.

• Deny: Outright deny posting the answer.

This should reduce the number of users posting small and cryptic answers linking to an other site.

I think a change is required as this has become a community problem and this trend cannot be reversed on a case-by-case down-voting of those types of answers. New users have no idea that this is frowned upon which is why this problem needs to be solved systematically.

Answer 1

I propose simply downvoting un-useful answers. Works only client-side, but pretty effective nonetheless.

Answer 2

If a link is useful then it should be upvoted, if it's not useful then it should be downvoted.

It should be decided on a case-by-case basis, since there is no way for the system to know the efficacy of the answer.

Answer 3

The gist of your suggestion, from reading the comments is this:

I don't like answers meeting some criterion. While these answers are currently being downvoted, and the downvoting works to indicate that the answers are poor, I would prefer that these answers were never posted in the first place. Thus, it is important to introduce a potentially imperfect automated system to prevent these answers, because their mere existence is a community problem which requires immediate action.

From this rephrasing, I think you can clearly see that you've got two things you need to do before we can even think about specific implementation details:

• You need to prove to the community at large that this perceived problem does indeed exist
• If you are able to do that, you then need to demonstrate that rather than relying on the core mechanism for evaluating content on SO, which is peer moderation, an automated solution is required.

As it is, you have placed the cart before the horse by outlining an algorithm and arguing about its effectiveness before you have even demonstrated that the problem as stated exists.

Answer 4

To some degree, as a question asker, I would like a very, very quick and dirty answer, whatever it may be, rather than someone who might have a link handy skipping it because of the scary dialog box. Let the community handle it, and that will usually occur in cases where others post a better answer sans link. In cases where the only answer is from someone with a link, that's fine.

So it really needs to be done on a case-by-case basis, which can only effectively be handled by the community via voting.

A link-only answer isn't ideal, but it's better than nothing, and far from "wrong" or "bad".

Answer 5

I wouldn't want answers like this one banned.