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Possible Duplicate:
Why do some people answer in comments?
There seems to be a trend lately of people answering SO questions in the comments under the question. I don't mind seeing discussions under other answers, but when I see an answer masquerading as a comment under the question it gets under my skin.
How can we stop this behavior?
There are already badges that encourage proper behaviour. But now we also see badges that seem to encourage better commenting... so, choose your poison.
Perhaps when you see it going on, ask the 'answerer' (or even the asker) to write an answer that describes the scenario in the comment, so that it can be accepted and better found by search engines. Once this happens from time to time, the people that do it (like mmyers on this question?) might stop doing it quite so much.
And yes, I was tempted to write this in a comment instead. ;)
Do we want to stop that? If people decide to give up their reputation - fine. Means that someone else can just copy/edit/paste as an answer or that the asker can put it in as an answer and accept.
The new @ system might be helpful to remind people that they should put answers as an answer.
Funny how we spent the last year or so educating to put comments into comments and not as an answer, and now we need it the other way :)
I'm sure I've done this a few times, but it's because I initially just have an idea that is best phrased as a question, e.g. "how is Foo configured?" or "did you try installing Bar?" -- it's not always obvious at the beginning that this might be the seed of an answer, rather than just prodding the OP for more information.
We can discourage this issue getting worse by not adding support for more commenting features, like better formatting and line breaks, automatic notification of responses*, more support for code blocks etc. Perhaps the length limit should be lowered? I've rarely come close to hitting it as it is.
*okay, I was just making a funny there!
Comments are free text, you can't stop people putting answers in there. Well at least the good thing is there's an answer, and it sure beats adding plain comment as answer.
No, because six word answers suck
