Link-only answers in Low Quality review - how are these (are these?) supposed to be dealt with? [duplicate]

Question

About two weeks ago I performed some reviews from Low Quality queue. Per my recollection, back then I commented on about 60-80 link-only answers.

Today, I checked posts I commented from review queue.

As far as I can tell almost 40 posts remained unchanged. About 7-8 answers have been improved by their authors. The rest of commented posts may have been removed, but I can't tell how much because comments made to deleted posts disappear from the list at my profile page.

That so much of my comments appear to be in vain made me wonder how this review is expected to work? Was I supposed to check it later, maybe after a month or two, or three or more?

For the reference, below is a list of link only answers that did not change (full text quotes).

---

• "Take a look at this question"
• "Take a look at AGEIA PhysX"
• "http://www.mediawiki.org/ that should work"
• "Have you tried this one?"
• "Read Release It! - great book."
• "Observer could be good for you."
• "C2 has some more on YAGNI."
• "Search Stack Overflow."
• "FlashVideo Converter."
• "You can use ActiveWinamp."
• "http://iphone-bitcode.blogspot.in/2011/03/uiview-and-uiviewcontroller.html"
• "Intercepting Filter perhaps?"
• "http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/29788-geometrical-interpretation-of-the-1-d-dft"
• "Pete Brown has the answer."
• "gwt-dnd might be of service."
• "Dave have a look at this link please"
• "You probably want QTKit"
• "see http://delphi.about.com/od/indy/a/email-send-indy.htm"
• "http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=ObjExporter"
• "Maybe try using Pair class?"
• "PDFlib: http://www.pdflib.com/"
• "Found the answer here"
• "Yes, it's called a profiler."
• "this is a good suite that use http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/advchart.asp"
• "It looks a bit like Lazy Loading"
• "here is the tutorial http://doc.trolltech.com/4.3/tutorial.html"
• "This is also a good website."
• "Do you see one here? Neither do I."
• "This post can help: How do I Insert or Update (or overwrite) a record using NHibernate?"
• "May be too late, but this may help you...http://www.codeproject.com/KB/XML/xmlserializerforunknown.aspx"
• "Are you looking for this?"
• "Protege is good for developing ontologies."
• "There is a free Javascript certification site."
• "Java TimeZone"
• "http://www.connectionstrings.com is a great resource for connecting to all sorts of databases."
• "i have used zend guard before, and i believe in it. ;)"
• "an example using Spring 3"
• "Check Jasper Reports at http://jaspersoft.com/jasperreports"
• "A bit like Specification pattern"

Answer 1

Commenting, as you have been is good for several reasons:

• It (sometimes) prods the author into expanding the answer
• It leaves a clear indication for the next reviewer that someone has seen this, and nothing has changed, so they flag
• It saves moderators servicing the flag time, as we don't have to write a comment, since your comment basically covered it.

While that doesn't exactly provide for immediate action, it gives the author plenty of time to fix their answer, and they do eventually end up in our queue for handling. So, I'd say the work flow would be:

• No comment? Add one

• Existing review comment and nothing changed? Flag. A moderator can look at the answer and decide what action to take. This might be:

  • Leaving a comment ourselves (as a moderator), typical if we're looking at an accepted answer
  • Editing the answer ourselves (if we're able, and the answer is valued or accepted)
  • Converting the answer to a comment if the link still works
  • Deleting the answer until it meets our quality standards

There's of course very little sense in leaving repeated comments. If a mod leaves a comment on such an answer, it's usually to inform the user what they can do to have it restored.

Still, bear in mind, there are different types of link only answers:

click [link]this link[/link] it will help you

... and:

You should use [link]frogs.throb(42)[/link], it will prevent the bullfrogs from colliding with the turtle as you try to move it.

Some are indeed more useful than others. Context is important when you decide how to deal with them. Before flagging, the answer to "Can I just edit to improve this?" should be "no" in most cases. If you can't, or just don't feel like editing, let us know it's worth keeping when you flag.