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I recently read a question I found very interesting. It's here, if it matters

I put some effort into helping the person get a good answer, and when I was done I had made forward progress on solving the question but it wasn't a true answer. However, I felt that it was worth sharing with the community, and I thought the original asker would find my contribution useful, even if it wasn't an ANSWER.

So, what to do? Most of the time in this situation I just post my thoughts as a comment, but in this case what I had to say included a bunch of code and was far longer than a comment box. So I posted it without it being a true answer.

Is this what I'm supposed to do? Is there a standard way to mark my post as "not a full answer"?

I would love to see this question (probably in a modified form) make it into the FAQ.

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    While no complete answer is available, a partial answer can be immensely useful. So post your answer, say that it isn't a complete answer because you don't know the complete answer somewhere near the top, and hope that somebody (maybe you) soon finds the complete answer. – Daniel Fischer May 1 '13 at 13:28
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    Looks just fine to me. Just keep updating the answer when you have more progress and keep a close eye on the OP's comments. – Shadow9 May 1 '13 at 13:28
  • Yeah I thought it was good. I mostly only made this post because someone downvoted me ;) – durron597 May 1 '13 at 13:30
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    @durron597 I've met those downvotes as well. It's probably the best to ignore the downvotes, to quote the upvote tooltip or to link them here. Any chance this question should become a part of the FAQ? – John Dvorak May 1 '13 at 17:22
  • @JanDvorak edited per your comment – durron597 May 1 '13 at 18:02
  • Answers that essentially say "this answer isn't complete but I'm lazy to flesh it out and post something worthwhile, so I'll just leave a stub here for free votes" are subject to deletion as very low quality (aka content-free). Basically, if your answer is partial, as long as you make sure it provides some value without being a stub or looking lazy, you're safe. – BoltClock's a Unicorn May 1 '13 at 18:05
  • @BoltClock'saUnicorn In this particular case, it wasn't a stub, it was quite fleshed out. I put reasonable time and effort into my answer, but I didn't actually learn why the behavior in OP's question was what it was. And I had no idea how to further pursue it at the time. But I hoped my answer would help someone else, potentially. – durron597 May 1 '13 at 18:06
  • @durron597: I understand. I just reworded my comment to make it clear that it's acceptable (as in not immediately subject to deletion) under certain circumstances. – BoltClock's a Unicorn May 1 '13 at 18:08
  • @BoltClock'saUnicorn What do you think about the proposal to put this into the FAQ? – durron597 May 2 '13 at 12:55

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