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This answer to this question: Change from UEFI to Legacy, on AskUbuntu, has been accepted by the original question poster. However, it does not actually answer the OP's question (how to change an Ubuntu installation from booting in UEFI mode to Legacy mode). Therefore, others with the same question (such as myself) are presented with an answer marked as "accepted", but doesn't provide a solution to the question (it doesn't give any instructions on how to convert Ubuntu from UEFI to Legacy mode).

I can understand that the contents of the answer could not have been posted simply as a comment (it far exceeds the character limit for comments), however I don't believe it should be posted as an answer either. Should I flag this answer as "not an answer"?

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    Don't worry about downvotes on Meta. They just mean that people "disagree" rather than that it's a "bad question". In this case, if people downvote, you can read it as they answered "no". (Reputation isn't affected by votes on Meta, neither negative nor positive)
    – Dan
    Commented Oct 11 at 11:51
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    I don't have an opinion/answer on this, and I'm unsure if accepted answers can be deleted. But as a general rule, and on any SE site, the accepted answer isn't always the best. Most of the time, you should go for the more upvoted answers instead.
    – Dan
    Commented Oct 11 at 11:53
  • Note that if the answer has been around for a long time and has been accepted for a long time, it's very unlikely that a flag will result in any action on such a post for various reasons.
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Commented Oct 11 at 15:46

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Without providing a categorical answer to your question, I share this:

In your user dashboard, on its "Activity" tab, there is a box called "Impact", near the top right corner. It has an item involving "Flags". That's actually a link, leading to the list of flags you submitted.

If you flag something, it shows up on the top of that list with some status indicator; initially, something like "pending".

When a moderator evaluates the flag, there will be feedback left behind on that flag. Either as "helpful", or, if not deemed helpful / appropriate, then, according to my very positive experience, they will provide you with feedback about why it was deemed that way.

A rule of thumb: AskUbuntu, along with most other (if not all) SE sites, aims to be a practical and satisfactory collection of reliably usable answers.

So when an answer does not address this objective, then it is suspect for attention.

However, there is a concept of a partial answer, which contributes towards the issue to an extent that one can appreciate.

Furthermore, we recognise that people dealing with Linux may face challenges of diverse composition. So to accommodate that, one can recognise that some supplementary information —bound less than 100% strictly to the immediate topic—, may deserve to remain posted; just because of the appreciated potential that it can help out someone who is foraging info to develop a remedy to some weird unique challenge.

Regarding a less than perfect answer getting marked as accepted by the asker: as far as I know, apart from the asker, noone has power over that. It stays like that.

One may exert influence by casting votes.

On StackExchange, sites (mods?) can decide how answers should be ranked by default; whether an accepted answer with lower vote count should precede non-accepted, but higher upvoted answers.

That is a policy decision, deserving its own meta question; I wouldn't be surprised if it already existed.

It also has to do with solidarity and recognising the human factor in user engagement. If you would get too perfectionist in pursuit of the primary objective, then it would impose the requirement on community members to post only 100% perfect answers, which, depending on the topic of the question, may impose a lot of effort. So in the end, moderation (in which you participate when flagging) involves the judgement of balancing between a satisfactory niveau of answers, and the acknowledgement of the burden that producing those answers imposes on people who provide them.

Though, I would say, there is a confident tendency towards enforcing the quality, the reliability of the content.

You'll get the hang of it the more you participate in it. Though, certain biases might develop. Then we can discuss those, and everything involving moderation, e.g. in the "Raiders of the lost Downboat" chat room.

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For context: the answerer (Rod Smith) is an authority on the matter. He definetly has a word there.

But besides, is that actually a case of "not an answer"? How to go about doing the thing is addressed, although not too much in detail, in the last paragraph:

If you insist on ignoring my advice, you can do the conversion. In brief, you must enable your computer's CSM and install a BIOS-mode boot loader for Linux. The most common of these is the BIOS-mode version of GRUB. The Boot Repair tool will do this in a semi-automated way; however, you must boot the OS used to run Boot Repair in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode, and this in turn requires either luck or that you understand how to control the boot mode. See my page on the CSM, referenced earlier, for information on this topic. If you use GRUB, you should also create a BIOS Boot Partition on your disk (it probably does not exist now).

In general, though I agree "don't do it" answers technically don't answer the question, I personally:

  1. Let them be
  2. Upvote them if they're useful / agreeable
  3. Downvote them if they're unuseful / disagreeable

I may have answered in a similar fashion myself at times.

I personally tend to regard them as "good responses", if there's a decent reasoning behind the assertion; ultimately that is (often, not always) more useful than getting to know how to do something dangerous or useless.

In general: acceptance is up to OP. There's no standard enforcement on accepted answers; they might be correct, wrong, useful, unuseful or whatever. Being accepted should not be a factor in deciding whether the answer should stay or not, all that matters is if the answer is a "valid" answer, which could be subject to debate as you note.

And IIRC accepted answers can't be deleted anyways.

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