A link to each answer at the top - Feature Request

Question

I would like to propose putting link pointers to each answer at the start of the answers section. This would be in the style of a contents page.

By looking at the link description, one can directly head into the required answer, suppose a question like nginx php config types might have more than one answer like php.conf as well as /etc/nginx/sites-available/default... which can be shown as different links, and user can choose what they wish to look at.

In questions with many answers, this feature will be useful to quickly move to the most promising answer.

ADDED - As asked by commentors - this is somewhat what I am thinking of... question and the answer labels don't relate, but I am pasting a general style ANSWERS

Answer 1

This is impractical.

If there's only one answer, what's the point?

If there's dozens of answers, how is this useful? Especially when answers may be on a second page.

Don't forget, either, that answers can be sorted a number of ways. How do you sort the links?

At most, an anchor link to the top of the answers ("jump to answers") might be useful, but only if it's a long question and/or has a lot of comments.

So, I see very little utility for this.

Answer 2

With the majority of questions there is only really one answer (thats how we like it). Therefore all the titles will basically be the same as the question title (or more likely something worse).

However I was able to find a question where it would work (possibly because the question was a little too broad) and were this to be implemented here is a mockup of how I would do it

Answer 3

This loses practicality on questions where there really aren't too many diverse ways of going about something. Sure, you could theoretically have "With angular do this ... with jQuery do this .. with plain JS just do this ..." but that's probably a sign of a very poorly scoped question.

Even on canonical questions, there tends to usually be only one - or at most several - answers to a question once everything is condensed. In cases where this would be beneficial, you could simply insert it into the bottom of the question using existing markup, similar to this:

---

• Using jQuery and unicorn tears
• Plain Javascript implementation
• You should drop that and try CoffeeScript

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But again, this only becomes useful if you're drawing attention to posts that might otherwise be overlooked, which means that we're dealing with pages of answers, which almost always means something is very wrong with the question.

Declining, because I just don't see the payback justifying the additional complexity of answer titles, and codifying support for questions that sort of go off the rails. It's not a horrible idea, it just doesn't fit our model too well - anywhere that this becomes useful is probably an area deserving of quite a bit of editorial attention and cleanup.