I'm the moderator who did it.

It feels like the fair, and best course of action would be to treat these answers as I would any other answer from a user who I feel is inexperienced of the ways of the site. These answers don't exactly reflect the sort of quality one expects, and in this specific case is massively speculative. I've let users know in the comments of my expectations in quite a few instances where I've felt an answer was not good enough. Every single one of these comments were written specific to the answer, and thought went into them.

If I comment, I feel an answer is trivially salvagable. If not, deletion and optional comments to let the OP know is a tool for encouraging more substancial improvements. If I'm commenting multiple times with no response, well, clearly the OP dosen't see the need to make his question more awesome.

Links don't make answers. I've pointed out many times in the past, and have deleted many answers that were purely links with very similar messages. The request to flag once its corrected is literally one last chance to fix the issues with an answer, and in such a way I might not necessarily be the mod who deals with it. I could just as easily delete it and not give guidence, you've been on the site long enough to know how things should work,

Since you feel this is "too violent", Let me point out what the site rules say about this.

Answers that do not fundamentally answer the question may be removed. This includes answers that are:

• barely more than a link to an external site
• not even a partial answer to the actual question

Reimbursement of bounties is not typically the policies of the site. In addition, if the bounty is awarded since its the only answer, as opposed to the correct answer, it goes against both the spirit and letter of the rules. A bounty is literally spending reputation to advertise a question and there's no certainty of an answer.

Quite simply, this is merely a application of the rules of the site to both the letter and the spirit of it.

I'm the moderator who did it.

It feels like the fair, and best course of action would be to treat these answers as I would any other answer from a user who I feel is inexperienced of the ways of the site. These answers don't exactly reflect the sort of quality one expects, and in this specific case is massively speculative. I've let users know in the comments of my expectations in quite a few instances where I've felt an answer was not good enough. Every single one of these comments were written specific to the answer, and thought went into them.

If I comment, I feel an answer is trivially salvagable. If not, deletion and optional comments to let the OP know is a tool for encouraging more substancial improvements. If I'm commenting multiple times with no response, well, clearly the OP dosen't see the need to make his question more awesome.

Links don't make answers. I've pointed out many times in the past, and have deleted many answers that were purely links with very similar messages. The request to flag once its corrected is literally one last chance to fix the issues with an answer, and in such a way I might not necessarily be the mod who deals with it. I could just as easily delete it and not give guidence, you've been on the site long enough to know how things should work,

Since you feel this is "too violent", Let me point out what the site rules say about this.

Answers that do not fundamentally answer the question may be removed. This includes answers that are:

• barely more than a link to an external site
• not even a partial answer to the actual question

Reimbursement of bounties is not typically the policies of the site. In addition, if the bounty is awarded since its the only answer, as opposed to the correct answer, it goes against both the spirit and letter of the rules. A bounty is literally spending reputation to advertise a question and there's no certainty of an answer.

Quite simply, this is merely a application of the rules of the site to both the letter and the spirit of it.