Quality problems in regex answers [closed]

Question

I've been hanging out in the regex tag a lot lately, and I've noticed something I don't see as much in my other favorites (C#, LINQ, and a couple others): A disturbing number of regex answers are deeply, deeply wrong. I've posted about this before, but I thought that was an isolated incident or a difficult question. Unfortunately, the more time I spend in [regex], the more concerned I get. Today I noticed this fairly easy question, which has two three answers of severely low quality.

I'm not talking about small mistakes, like using \d* when you really need \d+, or typos, or getting lookbehind syntax wrong. Regex is hard; hell, I make mistakes like that all the time. Nor do I expect people to always test everything; I'm guilty of that one, too.

No, I'm talking about severe, fundamental problems with an answer. People are ignoring key points of a question, or posting a small change to the OP's pattern that does nothing to address the issue, or tossing out some mangled regex that shows a serious lack of thought or understanding. Before spending so much time in the regex tag, I hardly ever downvoted anything. Now I do it more and more often.

I don't have a solution to advocate here, because I've no idea how to fix this. But it's frustrating, and it would be nice to know if anything else can be done. Is it just the regex tag that's like this? Is it just me?

Answer 1

Like you said, Regex's are hard. That makes it easy to screw up an answer. Even worse, Regex questions often lend themselves to "one-liners". That makes it easy to post an answer. Combine those two facts, and you have answers that are easy to post and easy to get wrong. I'm not sure there's too much to be done about that, beyond downvoting clearly incorrect answers, and maybe even posting good answers yourself.

Answer 2

Whatever you do, please do not flag for moderator attention! This is directed not necessarily at you, but to anyone who reads this question.

Moderators cannot determine the "correctness" of answers. No one person is knowledgeable enough to do this for all questions... not even His Skeetness. We're janitors. No, not even janitors; janitors get paid. We're volunteers with mops and vomit buckets. Even if it was the job of a janitor to evaluate the correctness of selected answers, we don't have enough time to volunteer doing so.

Downvote, comment, provide alternate answers...

Hell, give them the stink eye

ಠ_ಠ

But don't flag for mod attention.