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I'm in little confusion today. While reviewing Low Quality Posts, I encountered this post. I was curious that why the answerer is so confident. So, I just viewed their profile and this site and found the answerer is the CEO of company behind that software.

I remember reading a meta post on Unix & Linux where a mod deleted the answer by the original developer/author of the project and after going deeper they undone their decision.

In my opinion the answers by the authors/CEO matters the most since at the end they are answerable for any thing in their software. Considering that, I clicked on "Looks OK". Was my action appropriate here? If not, what is the appropriate action on such posts? Should we leave a comment under the answer and let the other reviewers know that they are the original developer/author/CEO and save the answer from getting deleted?

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  • You're right, I should have answered more in detail, I was just in a hurry. I've now expanded the answer. Thanks for not deleting it earlier.
    – Ingo Kegel
    Commented Jun 23, 2019 at 10:37
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    @IngoKegel You had my upvote in the first place :-)
    – Kulfy
    Commented Jun 23, 2019 at 15:32

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I don't think it's an inappropriate or unhelpful answer and it does our users no benefit to remove it.

It could certainly be better. Ideas:

  • An explanation that they're the co-owner of the company that makes this thing
  • A link to something at their end showing that they're fixing it (eg public bug tracker)

That is all to say, your actions here have been wholly appropriate. You've been careful about how you've reviewed, you've put in leg work and you've even second-guessed yourself. I wish we were all able to be as introspective as this. Good work.

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  • A link to something at their end showing that they're fixing it (eg public bug tracker): Wouldn't it make the question off-topic since AFAIK bug reports are off-topic here? (PS: I have been always confused about this close reason). By the way, I just saw you left a comment on the post. Thank you for that :-)
    – Kulfy
    Commented Jun 23, 2019 at 9:42
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    @Kulfy People misunderstand "bug reports are off-topic" thing. When someone comes and asks a question that basically says "Hi, I found a bug, please fix this" - this is off-topic because we're community and not owners/developers of the software. When the question is "Hi, this thingy doesn't work. How do I fix it?" it's not a bug report. When an answer to a question is "Yep, that's a bug and there's a report" - that's acceptable, because it explains the question and shows either that there is a fix, planned fix, or that developers are aware.
    – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
    Commented Jun 24, 2019 at 0:46
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    @Kulfy Also, question doesn't become automatically off-topic if an answer finds the problem in question is a bug.
    – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
    Commented Jun 24, 2019 at 0:52
  • @SergiyKolodyazhnyy But I have seen questions whose answer is something like, "This is a bug #blabla reported on launchpad and as a workaround you can do this and that" getting close against the same reason.
    – Kulfy
    Commented Jun 24, 2019 at 16:43
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    @Kulfy And that is an example where question is closed incorrectly
    – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
    Commented Jun 24, 2019 at 18:01
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I don't think there is any good reason to treat an answer by a developer/owner any differently to an answer by anyone else. I can't think of why someone would delete such an answer, unless it had problems that would have caused it to be deleted anyway, regardless of who it was.

An answer by someone involved in the development of some software is likely to be highly knowledgeable and very helpful, and may contain some insight unavailable to anyone else answering.

An answer that is not helpful and serves only to promote their product would be considered spam regardless of who they are, requiring no special treatment based on who posted it.

The only thing I might recommend would be that the answer should point out their relationship to the company, not as a mandatory rule but just to help lend credibility to the answer. If I found that an answer was written by the CEO of the company who produce the software and didn't disclose this, I'd consider pointing it out in a comment.

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  • Hey Thomas, actually the original answer was simply, This will be fixed in install4j 8.0 in about 2 weeks. which in my opinion doesn't qualify as an answer. And then Ingo edited it to make it a proper answer. Also, I won't consider as spam since that question was about their product. And they weren't promoting their product nor the answer was irrelevant. I'd consider pointing it out in a comment.: That's a good thing but I wanted to know the perspectives of Community and I believe many agrees with Oli.
    – Kulfy
    Commented Jul 5, 2019 at 11:27

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