up vote -9 down vote favorite

I know I can't expect quality of SO on SU, but moderators deleting answers for no reason at all? That's going too far.

How to mess up a PC running Windows 7?

It's not a duplicate, it's on-topic, it's an valid answer. So why was it deleted?

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locked by random♦ May 2 '11 at 0:40

2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Your post has been deleted because it doesn't meet up with the quality of a top question.

You are talking about expecting quality, but your answer

Toggle off bootable flag for the Windows partition (fix is obviously turning it on again)

isn't really of any quality as it

  1. Does not follow the guidelines put by the moderators, which ensure good answers for the student.
  2. Does not explain how you can toggle the partition to be active or not.

Hence, your answer misses quality and is considered to be not constructive and thus not useful.

I really don't see how your answer educates upcoming system administrators...

What Moderation and Stack Exchange are about.

Having moderators decide which answers are good is exact opposite of StackExchange. Moderators of SO know it, moderators of Programmers know it, so do the ones on ServerFault. I can see that here at least 3 moderators totally don't get the idea. If you feel answer is bad, you down vote it, as any other user, not abuse moderator privileges to delete answer, which hadn't had a single down vote.

Not really, one of the tasks of a moderator is to guide the community. And Stack Exchange is all about learning. So, in order to learn something useful from that question, we need answers that are of quality and not a list of one-liners that are quickly typed out and don't educate the user much. If three moderators totally don't get the idea, feel free to contact the Stack Exchange team. But honestly, I think they did the right thing.

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@vartec: You have read that prior to answering, I agree on some moderators not leaving a comment but that's not what this seems to be about. Explication on how to set the partition flags is necessary, as that doesn't speak for itself and requires you to know your way around in a partition manager out of bounds. – Tom Wijsman May 1 '11 at 13:18
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@vartec: Ignorant behavior won't get you far. If you don't want to read the question before answering and want to leave the community because of that, there isn't much that we can do for you... – Tom Wijsman May 1 '11 at 13:29
First of all, I don't want to leave the community, but only the SU. Secondly, not because my answer got deleted, but because of the way SU moderators handle whole situation. First of all they didn't even bother to notify about deletion, the didn't bother to mention the reason, and now they are stalking me to downvote my questions on other SE sites. It's really pathetic. – vartec May 1 '11 at 18:29
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@vartec: The system notifies you about the deletion, the reason is given to you prior to answering, so I once again don't see the problem. You should reference to that stalking. And yes, ranting can hurt your reputation... – Tom Wijsman May 1 '11 at 19:20
@vartec: No, you seem to have noticed it so you have been notified. You don't need an explicit message as that would result in an unnecessary undo, however, you can still improve the answer. I wasn't talking about your reputation score, I was talking about your reputation. Have fun ranting, I'm out of here... ;-) – Tom Wijsman May 1 '11 at 20:27
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up vote 14 down vote

One of the preconditions on the question:

One-liner answers, that fail to explain how they work or what the do, will be converted to comments.

Post was flagged for onliner & insufficient info... and was deleted by me. Also, similar answer was posted prior to your post.

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The person who asked the question made it very clear what the guidelines for the question were. You are welcome to post a new answer regarding the same idea if you add enough detail to make it worthwhile, but it really isn't a big deal. – nhinkle♦ Apr 30 '11 at 14:41
@nhinkle: I won't bother. Actually I won't bother with SU at all. I'll stick with decently moderated sites, like SO, SF and Programmers. Congratulations on driving users away. – vartec May 1 '11 at 12:03
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@vartec: No, it's just you that take the decision to leave because you don't want to follow guidelines, just improve your answer or leave it as is... http://xkcd.com/386/ – Tom Wijsman May 1 '11 at 13:11
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@vartec I can see your point to some extent, but why not post an improved answer then instead of ranting here? – Pekka May 1 '11 at 14:04
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@vartec well. Under normal circumstances the deletion would have been totally unjustified - yours was a viable answer. But in a busy question, moderators are expected to be on guard to keep it from turning into a complete crapfest. If, in order to do that, they set the rule that one-liners are going to be removed, and you post a one-liner, it's clear what's going to happen. It's so easy to pad an answer with a bit of meaningful information to avoid this - if you're active on any of the SO sites, you know how it's done. – Pekka May 1 '11 at 14:10
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