Again, you’re not answering the person who asked but every person who ever will. Some of them will be asking because the “right way” is not an option in their situation.
And those people can look for questions where the "right way" is justifiably unusable, or pose those questions themselves (and find out if they really have to avoid it.)
Because you're answering every person who ever will ask, a lot of the people who pass through your question & answer will be people who don't know the difference between the right way and the wrong way. If they want to know how to do something the wrong way, because they don't know what the right way is, an answer that simply tells them how is a bad resource.
It's not enough to tag caveats onto such dangerous answers, because people can't read. Instead, newbies should have to overcome a sufficient amount of opposition to filter out those who don't know why they're doing what they want to do, and the rest can make the little effort of being very explicit about why they want to do something the wrong way.
Exactly. I've seen precisely this "documentation antipattern" occur many times. "How do I do X with Y"? "You probably want to do Z instead". Upvoted, question answered, all other related questions of "no, really I do want to do Y" get closed as duplicates.
Then Googling for doing X with Y gets you a bunch of closed questions and a labyrinth of links all leading to a question that was answered 10 years ago on a different software version where Z possibly was the right way to do it but now isn't.
And of course there's no way to reopen the question because it has been closed by a level 15 Magister Templi moderator and a lowly level 3 apprentice moderator like yourself needs to either answer 146 more questions or moderate 192 other questions to clear enough arbitrary hurdles to achieve holy question reopening powers.
And there's possibly an appeals process but that involves recruiting 13 moderators who you have to convince to give this question special treatment and declare that one of their number of sacred moderators made a mistake.
Yes. StackOverflow mods frequently mark questions duplicate that are not. That is something that has been observed by many many people.
Some of it is that SO has gamified shitting on and suppressing the question/asker instead of gamified providing the answer, and built a culture of toxicity that tolerates the abuse of the tools in this fashion.
And when the CEO asked them to tone it down maybe 5 years ago they basically did a collective “am I so out of touch? no, it’s the askers who are wrong”. Extremely funny to read the meta responses to that at the time.
(admittedly "women and people who don't speak english well are particularly unlikely to adopt to the pedantic neckbeard culture we've built" is a spicy take for your average SO'er, or wikipedian, but it's also not actually a wrong one either. SO's culture problems probably do disproportionately chase away users with marginal engagement, nobody likes putting up with formalized neckbeard culture and those users have absolutely encountered it before and absolutely have an aversion/revulsion to entering yet another online neckbeard nest. I think this is a case of “he’s probably right but the medicine would have gone down better with the manchildren if he hadn’t mentioned women and minorities”, and he’s also right that those issues have continued to bury SO over the last 5 years.)
> Because you're answering every person who ever will ask, a lot of the people who pass through your question & answer will be people who don't know the difference between the right way and the wrong way.
Then you have to do two things in your answer:
1. Correctly answer the question as asked.
2. Add your opinion about the "right way" to do it.
If you only do #2, you are failing "every person who ever will ask."
Again, I don't think this enough - because it's a well-acknowledged fact that people can't read[0] (as I said in my comment.) How many newbies are going to see a working solution, try it out, and immediately skip all the extra text that they don't think they need?
> Again, I don't think this enough - because it's a well-acknowledged fact that people can't read[0] (as I said in my comment.) How many newbies are going to see a working solution, try it out, and immediately skip all the extra text that they don't think they need?
You know that's not your responsibility. If some newbie makes a mistake, that's their responsibility (and a learning experience for them).
And frankly, I think you greatly overestimate how valuable and essential your non-responsive "you're asking the wrong question" answer is.
>That link is about users. You're misapplying its lesson if you're using it to justify not answering a developer's development question.
Why do you think "users" is an inaccurate description of the role question askers have on a developer Q&A board?
Put another way - when was the last time you used a development tool, or a library, or some other resource, and sat down to read the full documentation of it? I would posit that that's very rare as an activity, even for developers who need to develop a deep understanding of what they're using.
It's much more common to learn by doing, and the limit of that learning is very often what the developer can't do. Answers which easily enable developers to do something are overwhelmingly likely to lead to developers doing that thing - much in the same way that a long page of library documentation which gives an example is likely to lead to developers repeating that example, even if at the end of the docs, there's a little caveat saying that you shouldn't follow the example for so-and-so reason.
>If some newbie makes a mistake, that's their responsibility (and a learning experience for them).
But is it a good experience? Sure, maybe they'll learn that they always have to read the whole answer before they use any part of it. But we sensibly have abandoned this no-guardrails approach to teaching in almost every arena where it's been used, because it's not really suited to the way people do things in real life - and in real life, people often end up affecting others with their mistakes.
Does junior developer who learns how to glue SQL strings together in their favourite programming language, and makes the "small mistake" of not learning anything about SQL injection in the process, benefit from the learning experience when they cause a data leak? Do their customers? Or should the learning resources they access maybe use the pedagogical tools available to make sure those kinds of mistakes are really hard to make, even if it occasionally inconveniences a seasoned pro?
> Why do you think "users" is an inaccurate description of the role question askers have on a developer Q&A board?
The are a lot of different kinds of "users," and I think the kind of thinking in that article is totally inappropriate when applied to developer Q&A board.
To be perfectly blunt: the result if what you're advocating is to condescendingly treat experienced people as newbies so dumb that their question should not be answered, because you think they're so dumb the real answer might distract them from the lecture you want to condescendingly give them.
People like that are super annoying and almost always unhelpful.
Every single fucking question I ask on SO has some lazy condescending dude chiming in to answer the easy question he thinks I should have asked, after he totally failed to understand the constraints that made my question hard. Of course, lazy condescending dude always thinks he knows better.
No, the best thing is not assume you know better than anyone who will ever ask this. It’s good to mention what the right way is and why but your answer should always include the answer to the question exactly as asked at a minimum.
I agree but sometimes the answer exactly as asked leads to wrong things. So sometimes you don"t provide the answer to the exact question but include the reason why the exact question is not good. This gives the option for the questioner to comment why the exact answer is needed.
My experience with less experienced developers is that they ask the exact question as that is where they have stuck but they are ignorant of the better ways.
I do tend to answer differently depending on the questioners reputation. If they have a higher rep then I can assume they know what they are doing.
