If I downvote every competing answer, will I get flagged for vote abuse?

Question

I just wrote an answer to this regex question, which was trying to find numeric strings with or without commas (e.g. 1,234,567.89). I wanted to be thorough because I've seen this problem a lot, both on SO and in real-world code.

When I finished, I found 7 other new answers waiting for me, mostly variations on each other. Which would be fine, except for one thing: They're garbage answers. Unless I'm severely mistaken, every answer but mine (so far) is deeply flawed, and I want to downvote all of them. Yeah, I'm a stickler on regex, but IMHO if your pattern lets stuff like  ...,.,,.,,..9 or even ... pass as "numeric input," then you've failed to meet even the bare minimum requirements.

Enough venting. The reason I'm whining to Meta about this is that I'm about to do something that'll REALLY look like tactical downvoting, and I'm mildly concerned about the consequences. If I answer a question and then rain downvotes on every competing answer, will I get flagged for abuse? That would certainly seem like suspicious behavior to me.

More of an opinion question: At what point does a semi-correct answer deserve a downvote? Obviously, if it were just a typo, I'd edit it myself. Where's the line between "close enough" and "this answer sucks?"

Basically, is it just me? You've seen the question; am I right that these answers deserve downvotes? Seven people thought that [0-9,.]+ was good enough to declare something a number, so why am I the only one who doesn't?

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Note: I found some related questions, but nothing that seemed like a duplicate:

• What's the etiquette on downvoting every wrong answer to a given question? - More of an etiquette question, plus the voter hadn't posted his own answer.
• Does an answer that ignores major details in a question deserve a downvote? - I guess this pretty much covers my second question.

Also, as some have noted, my answer ended up pretty long and thorough. I put in a lot of effort because, with all this talk about how the other answers sucked, I wanted to be extra sure mine didn't. I don't expect pages of detail in a normal SO answer.

Answer 1

I don't like downvoting.

Get over it. This scenario is more common than you realize, and will continue to be so long as the folks who do know how to differentiate "correct" from "incorrect" withhold their votes.

Seven people thought that [0-9,.]+ was "good enough" to match numbers, so why am I the only one who doesn't?

One of two options:

1. You're the only one who actually thought it through enough to realize how it could fail.
2. You're wrong.

Fortunately, it's fairly easy to come up with a simple demonstration that will clearly indicate which of those options is applicable here. I recommend either including that in your answer (best option) or in comments on the many answers you'll be down-voting (meh...)

(Oh, and to address your other, lesser concerns: when it sorta doesn't work, not that I'm aware of, and test it!)

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I got called away before having a chance to post this, but I did take a look at the question you use as an example, and most of the answers had a much bigger problem than simply being wrong: their authors had made no attempt to explain why this answer was preferable to one of the eight other answers. What's a poor reader supposed to do? Go through and test every single one? Figure out what it matches and what it doesn't, then decide on their own if that'll work for them?

Well, yes. Initially at least. Fortunately, regexs, especially short ones like these, are fairly easy to test. But once tested, it's important that readers - you included - go back and pick up the slack for the slacking authors: comment on what's matched and what isn't, down-vote what plain doesn't work.

Revisiting the question now, I see that several of the answers have been removed. Those are answers that future readers won't have to evaluate when searching for their solution. SO-style Q&A: 1, forum-style "everything clogs the tubes for eternity": 0.