4

Questioner answers his own question with hack answer

Questioner decided to ignore DIY.SE advice and instead chose not to install any kind of box or approved plate and instead mounted his cable plate with molly bolts sunk into drywall.

IMO a very "harry homeowner" choice - a solution that will end up needing a new solution by someone else later.

So the question is, when answers (maybe this one maybe not) contain bad advice, beyond the simply solution of down-voting, should we do more? Especially when the answer is given by the questioner and thus is likely going to be the 'accepted' answer.

2 Answers 2

7

If the questioner accepts their own answer, it doesn't get sorted to the top like it would if they accepted an answer from another user. The highest-voted answer will appear at the top (assuming you're sorting by votes), and the questioner's answer will appear wherever it would be based only on votes; in the case of the question you're referring to, the bottom (at least at the time of writing).

In other words, the system is working as designed; downvote bad answers and upvote good. If the user chooses to ignore the advice they get, at least the better content will be shown first.

1
  • Put another way: Bad answers are discouraged already, since there's a -1 pile-on for truly bad answers. Sep 25, 2012 at 15:13
6

Down voting and comments are the best options I can think of. Flagging to delete the answer would mean that others wouldn't see that this is a bad choice.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .