I personally starting to be a bit fed up with the prevalence of what I call "linking hit-and-runs" answers (Example).
The major problems with these types of answer are that:
- Requires the asking user to read a complete article to find something that may be buried really deep. (or worse, actually browse the site)
- Usually steals reputation from people who are putting an effort in their answer.
- The links may die unexpectedly, leaving future visitors without the answer they are looking for.
Feature Proposal
This feature proposal is reduce posting of "linking hit-and-runs" answers.
An answer is a "linking hit-and-run" if links occupy >= 15% of the body and the character count if lower or equal to 200.
If an answer is qualified as a "linking hit-and-run", one of the following actions could be implemented:
Warning Only: Warn the user that his answer is a "linking hit-and-run" and considered bad etiquette on this website to post that kind of answer and that posting such answer might incur negative reputation for that very reason.
Warning and CW: Warn the user that his answer is a "linking hit-and-run" and that it will be marked as community wiki unless he adds more body content. If the user decides to post the answer anyway, the answer is marked community wiki and no reputation is gained.
Deny: Outright deny posting the answer.
This should reduce the number of users posting small and cryptic answers linking to an other site.
I think a change is required as this has become a community problem and this trend cannot be reversed on a case-by-case down-voting of those types of answers. New users have no idea that this is frown upon which is why this problem needs to be solved systematically.
LAR Calculator
The following program calculates the ratio of posts considered to be "linking hit-and-runs" in the SO data dumps. Simply run it in the same directory as the data-dump you want to parse.
It will show you two ratios. LAR/Total is the number of LARs relative to the total numbers of posts. LAR/Qualify is the number of LARs relative to the number of posts below 200 characters.
Source: Read Source