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Community Bot
Community Bot
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Let's say we have a question of the form "How can I make X do Y?" and it is a perfectly valid, on-topic question. Now suppose someone then posts an answer which basically says "Forget X and just switch to Z", even though an answer on how to make X do Y would probably be feasible or is already provided by someone else. A typical example of this might be a question like "How do I configure Ubuntu in this particular way?", and someone responds with "Don't use Ubuntu, just use Windows/Linux Mint/Arch/whatever".

I have noticed a few users posting answers like these, and they don't seem to quite understand that their proposed solutions are not helpful because they do resolve the issue, if only by running away from it.

For actual examples of where this occurred, take a look at the following:

I think this is getting to be enough of a problem that we should have some sort of policy and procedure for handling these.

Let's say we have a question of the form "How can I make X do Y?" and it is a perfectly valid, on-topic question. Now suppose someone then posts an answer which basically says "Forget X and just switch to Z", even though an answer on how to make X do Y would probably be feasible or is already provided by someone else. A typical example of this might be a question like "How do I configure Ubuntu in this particular way?", and someone responds with "Don't use Ubuntu, just use Windows/Linux Mint/Arch/whatever".

I have noticed a few users posting answers like these, and they don't seem to quite understand that their proposed solutions are not helpful because they do resolve the issue, if only by running away from it.

For actual examples of where this occurred, take a look at the following:

I think this is getting to be enough of a problem that we should have some sort of policy and procedure for handling these.

Let's say we have a question of the form "How can I make X do Y?" and it is a perfectly valid, on-topic question. Now suppose someone then posts an answer which basically says "Forget X and just switch to Z", even though an answer on how to make X do Y would probably be feasible or is already provided by someone else. A typical example of this might be a question like "How do I configure Ubuntu in this particular way?", and someone responds with "Don't use Ubuntu, just use Windows/Linux Mint/Arch/whatever".

I have noticed a few users posting answers like these, and they don't seem to quite understand that their proposed solutions are not helpful because they do resolve the issue, if only by running away from it.

For actual examples of where this occurred, take a look at the following:

I think this is getting to be enough of a problem that we should have some sort of policy and procedure for handling these.

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Knowledge Cube
Knowledge Cube
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How should answers which basically equate to "give up and use x instead" be handled?

Let's say we have a question of the form "How can I make X do Y?" and it is a perfectly valid, on-topic question. Now suppose someone then posts an answer which basically says "Forget X and just switch to Z", even though an answer on how to make X do Y would probably be feasible or is already provided by someone else. A typical example of this might be a question like "How do I configure Ubuntu in this particular way?", and someone responds with "Don't use Ubuntu, just use Windows/Linux Mint/Arch/whatever".

I have noticed a few users posting answers like these, and they don't seem to quite understand that their proposed solutions are not helpful because they do resolve the issue, if only by running away from it.

For actual examples of where this occurred, take a look at the following:

I think this is getting to be enough of a problem that we should have some sort of policy and procedure for handling these.