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From http://$SITE.stackexchange.com/help/behavior.

Do not use signature, taglines, or greetings. Every post you make is already “signed” with your standard user card, which links directly back to your user page. If you use an additional signature or tagline, it will be removed to reduce noise in the questions and answers.

Is adding the following line to your answer covered by this rule?

"Hope that answered your question"

we had a mini edit war over this on the site, so I wanted to get an official ruling before contributing my edit or a moderator flag.

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    First impression: yes, it's just noise. No time to look further ATM.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Dec 24, 2014 at 13:15

2 Answers 2

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Remove it.

It adds nothing meaningful to the answer. It's noise that contains zero information. The help page about behavior of course only mentions signatures and taglines, since that's just as common, but the rationale for removing those fragments is the same: any visitor (or even the OP) who finds such a post will not care about this piece of text. Quite the contrary, it just takes up space on the page and wastes time of others.

Still, try not to get into an edit war over it. If the poster insists on having that sentence in their answer, let them do that. Tell them that it's not encouraged. If they continue adding it to every post they're writing, it might be necessary for a moderator to send them a reminder not to do it.

And either way, if that person always hopes that they've answered a question, or hopes that helps, then that'd make me wonder whether the user really should've posted an answer in the first place, or is just guessing.

See also: Should 'Hi', 'thanks,' taglines, and salutations be removed from posts?

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  • This is indeed the case of "continue adding" by user's own admission. Quoting from the comment made after the edit was reverted: Im really glad about the spelling correction but please dont mess with the way i do my answers... i like to personnalize my things with a little last sentence... . Admittedly I didn't bother checking the accuracy of that by cheking their other posts.
    – DVK
    Commented Dec 24, 2014 at 13:26
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    One could argue that this kind of "personalization" is not allowed. You may have your own way of writing, but when it comes to adding noise on purpose or not properly capitalizing, that's where "personal style" ends. (Yes, there are users who have claimed that lowercasing the "i" is personal style and should not be edited… no, that's not a good reason.) What matters is the content and the quality of the post, not who wrote it.
    – slhck
    Commented Dec 24, 2014 at 13:30
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Yes, it's extraneous and doesn't need to be in the post. It doesn't add any information to the answer.

However, it's really a very minor thing. If there's nothing else to fix, don't bother editing it (which bumps it to the front page), because that would just be too insignificant of a thing to edit a post for.

And of course, it's definitely not worth arguing about or getting into an edit war, unless it becomes a recurring problem (in which case you should flag for a moderator with an "other" flag).

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