I've flagged the followings as not an answer:
- https://stackoverflow.com/a/6049319/493122
- https://stackoverflow.com/a/1560748/493122
- https://stackoverflow.com/a/3659728/493122
- https://stackoverflow.com/a/16661576/493122
And they got declines because:
- declined - Not everything that contains a link needs to be flagged.
- declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it
- declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it
- declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it
Now, while I totally agree that not every answer that contains a link needs to be flagged, these are the classical examples of lazy answers where the post author takes credit from an external resource that might disappear in the future. And the only text in all these answers is a rephrasing of "See this link". There's not even an hint of an answer in there. It's just a link to an external resource.
When I flag an "answer" as not an answer I ask myself: is this even partially (which includes phrases like "Use X. See [link] how") an answer if every link it contains is dead? In all the above links it is not. We are left with (replacing the dead link text with "nothing"):
- See the example in this link to see a use-case: nothing.
- I did see a couple of PHP SDK's for SMS: 1. nothing, 2. nothing, 3 nothing.
- See nothing. Here you will find your answer.
- See nothing it tells you the whole story
What should I do with these answers then? Let them be?
Should I comment something like "It's better to include part of the resource you are linking to" that nobody will see and the author won't care about anyway (because it's answer cannot be deleted for that so his precious reputation is safe)?
Should I expect for those links to actually be dead in order to flag them (this means that I have always to check whatever the link is available and even then the link could disappear one minute later)?
Should I edit the answer myself to include the part of the resource in the post (but why would I spend time for someone that didn't have the will to take 1 minute of his life to do that himself?)?
Please tell me what I should do in this case. Should the above answers be deleted?