4

Possible Duplicate:
Answers converted to comments should retain upvotes

This question: android: how do i use the progress bar? has an answer that should have been a comment on another answer.

In most cases I would flag as 'not an answer', the answer would be converted to a comment, and everything would be right in the world. However, in this case the comment-answer is an important caveat to the accepted answer and has a number of votes because of that.

Is there any way to convert an answer to a comment while not losing the information captured by its votes? Should there be?

Edit: To be clear, I don't care about the rep of the user who posted the comment-answer. They should've posted a comment. I do care about preserving the community's recognition of the usefulness of what they said. That's important information for future visitors. Something like Jeremy's suggestion of converting the comment-answer score into pure comment score would work, but feels a bit weird.

Improve this question
0

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
2

There are two possible questions here:

  1. Can you preserve the votes? No.
  2. Can you preserve the information implied by the votes? Yes.

You can preserve the information by editing the other answer -- the one that the non-answer adds to -- to include the new information; then flag the non-answer for deletion.

It might seem a little harsh, but I think preserving the votes is rewarding bad behavior. Just because the user had something good to add to the conversation, doesn't mean they get to break the rules.

Improve this answer
2

I kind of feel like the answer is a hard "no".

I'm not sure the reputation system should be crippled by edge cases such as this. As far as I know, any reputation you have is from visible content that already allows you to gain or lose reputation. If a recalc happened, you would lose the reputation anyway.

In the long run, it's the content that really matters. If it's worth saving, but not as something that can collect votes, then the votes need to go. If anything, you might be able to preserve the net upvotes as comment upvotes.

Improve this answer
0

This should be a comment and I converted it to one.

The reason he posted as an answer was because he didn't have enough rep (50) to post a comment.

Through luck he earned enough rep from the upvotes on his comment-as-answer to allow it to be converted to a comment and live within the conversion rules :)

So I'm sure the loss of rep has been adequately compensated for.

Improve this answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .