Yeah some things look right (so attract votes for effort) but are technically incorrect. It happens to anybody who answers enough on the site.

There are things you can do that are genuinely useful:

• Leave a comment. Explain what is wrong and why. Be technical. This lets the poster and other potential voters know. They can fix it, or even explain why they think you're wrong. A technical debate isn't automatically a bad thing.
• Push that home with a downvote. This adds urgency for the poster.
• If it's dangerously* wrong or an otherwise unsalvageably awful answer, flag it under one of the quality flags.
• If the user shows a wanton disdain for detail (ie they've posted this sort of stuff many times) use a custom "moderator attention" flag on the best example you can find and tell us the problem. There might be a bigger problem (eg sock puppets).

But don't call them an idiot (that's against the rules) or harass them across multiple posts. Keep your contact brief and technical. If it's a sustained issue, let us deal with them out-of-band.

_{* By dangerous, I mean an answer that tells the user to do something that a layman might not understand and in its raw form could easily lead to the loss of data. While rm -rf / variants are borderline offensive, there are milder examples of mistakes that could still cause serious harm. These can usually be edited to be safer but if they're also technically incorrect, flag them for the mods to dispose of.}

Yeah some things look right (so attract votes for effort) but are technically incorrect. It happens to anybody who answers enough on the site.

There are things you can do that are genuinely useful:

• Leave a comment. Explain what is wrong and why. Be technical. This lets the poster and other potential voters know. They can fix it, or even explain why they think you're wrong. A technical debate isn't automatically a bad thing.
• Push that home with a downvote. This adds urgency for the poster.
• If it's dangerously* wrong or an otherwise unsalvageably awful answer, flag it under one of the quality flags. But make sure you also leave a comment, or edit in a warning. The OP might see the answer before we see the flag.
• If the user shows a wanton disdain for detail (ie they've posted this sort of stuff many times) use a custom "moderator attention" flag on the best example you can find and tell us the problem. There might be a bigger problem (eg sock puppets).

But don't call them an idiot (that's against the rules) or harass them across multiple posts. Keep your contact brief and technical. If it's a sustained issue, let us deal with them out-of-band.

_{* By dangerous, I mean an answer that tells the user to do something that a layman might not understand and in its raw form could easily lead to the loss of data. While rm -rf / variants are borderline offensive, there are milder examples of mistakes that could still cause harm. These can usually be edited to be safer but if they're also technically incorrect, flag them for the mods to dispose of. No mod is going to fight you because it wasn't dangerous enough.}

Yeah some things look right (so attract votes for effort) but are technically incorrect. It happens to anybody who answers enough on the site.

There are things you can do that are genuinely useful:

• Leave a comment. Explain what is wrong and why. Be technical. This lets the poster and other potential voters know. They can fix it, or even explain why they think you're wrong. A technical debate isn't automatically a bad thing.
• Push that home with a downvote. This adds urgency for the poster.
• If it's dangerously wrong or an otherwise unsalvageably awful answer, flag it under one of the quality flags.
• If the user shows a wanton disdain for detail (ie they've posted this sort of stuff many times) use a custom "moderator attention" flag on the best example you can find and tell us the problem. There might be a bigger problem (eg sock puppets).

But don't call them an idiot (that's against the rules) or harass them across multiple posts. Keep your contact brief and technical. If it's a sustained issue, let us deal with them out-of-band.

Yeah some things look right (so attract votes for effort) but are technically incorrect. It happens to anybody who answers enough on the site.

There are things you can do that are genuinely useful:

• Leave a comment. Explain what is wrong and why. Be technical. This lets the poster and other potential voters know. They can fix it, or even explain why they think you're wrong. A technical debate isn't automatically a bad thing.
• Push that home with a downvote. This adds urgency for the poster.
• If it's dangerously* wrong or an otherwise unsalvageably awful answer, flag it under one of the quality flags.
• If the user shows a wanton disdain for detail (ie they've posted this sort of stuff many times) use a custom "moderator attention" flag on the best example you can find and tell us the problem. There might be a bigger problem (eg sock puppets).

But don't call them an idiot (that's against the rules) or harass them across multiple posts. Keep your contact brief and technical. If it's a sustained issue, let us deal with them out-of-band.

_{* By dangerous, I mean an answer that tells the user to do something that a layman might not understand and in its raw form could easily lead to the loss of data. While rm -rf / variants are borderline offensive, there are milder examples of mistakes that could still cause serious harm. These can usually be edited to be safer but if they're also technically incorrect, flag them for the mods to dispose of.}