Unless Marco and Stefano beat me to it, I can delete 10-20 answers in a day. These are usually answers that get flagged up by users for not being an answer. I'm fine with that, they're not answers and typically have little value as comments so need deleting (though some do and we do convert these out, when we can).

My problem is we're trying to grow a community at the same time as maintain a system. New users come on here and even with the warning screens, don't always understand that an answer is only ever supposed to be an answer. I've seen people post extremely long comments as answers, often people desperate to get some help on a question (sometimes already answered). They typically have slightly different scenarios through different hardware and software stacks.

My problem is that when I see one of these, my only real option for the system is to delete the post but this hurts because I'm essentially silencing somebody who needs help with something. I want to be able to do something for the user and for the system at the same time.

I consider the current behaviour as a bug. Taking a post that somebody has spent a long time writing and chucking it in the bin without any feedback is rude. I know we have to do it, but as it is, we're not helping somebody who is asking for help.

Extending from that, I think there are a couple of simple feature-requests that could easily remedy how we handle non-answers:

• ###Create a should-be-own-question flag.

  I would feel better if instead of outright snubbing a subquestion, users and moderators had the ability to turn something into its own question. In my mind, actioning this function would create a new question, attached to user with a notice that linked it back to the original question (which the user has already indicated as relevant), similar to the duplicate question notice, just in reverse, perhaps explaining why this is now its own question.

  There would be some missing meta-data and I think moderators would be happy enough writing in titles and tags for these new questions.

• ###Notify users when we close or delete something and tell them why.

  When there's a plain non-answer (eg, "Thanks, this really helped" or "This affected me too and the accepted answer worked!!1") it racks up flags fast. We delete them. The first the user finds out about it (AFAIK) is when they go to their profile page or the question and see a red answer.

  When things are deleted, we should have reasons, just like when you close something. This reason should be based off the flags (again, just like with close flags) but a moderator should be able to tailor the message so they can add extra detail.

  We had an incident last week that resulted in quite a long disagreement over how we moderate things. Up-front communication, built directly into the closing/deleting system would help new users understand the system, help make them improve their questions and hopefully would encourage them to stay on a site where they could see that the moderators aren't robots.