Are “evolving answers” supported on Super User?

Question

Preface: I believe that this question is somewhat in line with this other Meta question about troubleshooting questions in 2023.

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While calling out another user who chronically posts “answers” (such as this one) that are clearly comments asking for clarification or additional details the user retorted:

“You never heard of an evolving answer?”

Screenshot below.

This seems to be 100% CYA nonsense; an excuse fabricated to justify incorrect usages of the “answer” posting functionality. The user in question has over 434,000+ rep and has been a member of this site for 13+ years.

I have never heard of the term “evolving answer” used to excuse a comment being posted as an “answer” like this. And checking through official SuperUser page on answering questions I see utterly nothing that references “evolving answers.” I have always understood that an “answer” is an actual answer and that comments are often used to request clarification and such as clearly explained in this official SuperUser explanation of comments

When should I comment?

You should submit a comment if you want to:

• Request clarification from the author;
• Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post;
• Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated).

To me, an “evolving answer” does not exist and this user is simply making things up in an attempt to justify their posting of a comment as an answer.

That said, is there such a thing as “evolving answers” on Super User and perhaps other Stack Exchange sites? If so, can official guidelines please be shared to back up this “evolving answer” concept?

Answer 1

Well yes and no.

Answers shouldn't be speculative and in general provide a fully formed solution to the best of one's abilities for resolving a problem.

There's this odd little tradition in singapore called 'choping' - where people call dibs on a seat in a food court, this feels a little like that.

As a 100+ K user (and frankly at this point, not really caring about reputation) - I'd rather ask comments and guide folks to an answer, and get nerd sniped than worry about how many accepted answers or upvotes I get at this point

That said, solutions evolve over time

Sometimes what looks like a stub answer at first ends up getting built up. You go "I KNOW THIS!" then realise there's more nuance. You wake up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, with an epiphany gnawing on your mind like a small terrier. You come across a new feature that blows your mind that happens to solve a problem more elegantly than it did before.

THOSE are good evolving answers - not a series of 'try this this and this' until you know it solves the problem. Comments are meant for initial 'dorm room spaghetti' debugging (throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks) and refining a solution till you believe that it has a reasonable chance of solving it - then adding value in the why.

Answer 2

No, no, and absolutely NO.

Stack Exchange sites are not forums, but question and answer sites. That means you ask a single, well-contained, specific, narrowly answerable question, and someone answers it.

The question that was asked did not meet any of these criteria, and should have been closed. And the reason it should have been closed is precisely because it attracts open-ended answers of the type that you have mentioned.

Sadly the level of user moderation on Super User is abysmal compared to other sites like Stack Overflow, so objectively unsuitable questions like the one mentioned generally don't get closed, but are left open to attract objectively unsuitable answers.

Just because someone has farmed over 400k rep by breaking the rules, doesn't mean their viewpoint deserves any credence. Use your votes and flags to ensure the site is moderated correctly, and if a certain user continually shows up on moderators' radars, they will be dealt with accordingly.

Answer 3

Report on my evolving answer :

My answer did pinpoint the problem as bad RAM with my suggestion to run MemTest86. A pity that it was deleted by a moderator, so the poster put up his own answer. I still think that my deleted answer described a good and useful procedure.

The current state of the post is :

• There are 11 comments on the post. It's probably approaching the state where a moderator will sweep everything under the carpet into a conversation.
• My answer is smeared over 4 comments.
• I never got any feedback on my answer that was converted to a comment by a moderator, probably because the poster didn't understand anything in view of its format.
• The comments have reached a chaotic stage where it became hard to distinguish answers and responses. Luckily I tutored the poster on the @user syntax.

My own conclusion, and my private criteria of when to use a comment or an answer when not enough data is available for giving a final answer:

• If the question(s) to the poster are simple enough and fit into one comment, it should be used. I usually separate the questions in this case with an enumerator.
• If there are several questions to be asked and putting them all into one comment without any structure will be confusing for the poster, an answer should be used, but only with the expectation of reaching a conclusion.
• An answer that only got negative responses from the poster and led nowhere should be deleted by its author.
• Too much and too quick an intervention by a moderator should be avoided, as it may actually hinder a solution from being found.

In conclusion, I would think that some moderator should undelete my answer, but delete still all the comments below it. This will allow me to clean up my comments from below the post.

EDIT

I have copy-pasted my deleted finally-evolved answer to a new answer, which was upvoted and accepted by the poster.

By the number of downvotes, I can see that many people have totally missed out on the message I'm trying to pass in this example.

All I'm saying that there exist some unwritten rules that some moderators have imposed on our SU site. These rules do not, for example, exist on SO, where many answers would have been converted to comments by our moderators.

Some unanswered questions I have are :

1. Why should incorrect answers be kept on our site? Or by extension, should all answers except the accepted one be deleted as not answering the question?
2. Why should answers that provides a procedure for finding the solution be considered as unsuitable, to be converted into a comment? Mine is an example.
3. When there are many comments under a post and it gets harder to follow who said what, wouldn't it be clearer if they were divided among answers, rather than continue in this spaghetti?
4. Is sweeping too many comments into a conversation, or deleting them, a solution to what I call comments-hell?

All these questions I had hoped to demonstrate with this answer, but evidently I have only encountered discord.