I’ve noticed recently that numerous users (including high-rep users and even moderators) have been posting generic, hypothetical questions, followed immediately by an answer and accepting it.

I don’t have a problem with posting articles about solving problems (I do it myself on my blog, as do others like Russinovich), but I don’t think that this is the correct forum for this for several reasons:

• Some of the questions are not ones they actually faced but very generic questions
• If there is already such a question, then the answer should be posted there instead of making up a contrived question just for the sake of posting the answer
• There is already a Super User blog that can be used for posting truly noteworthy help/troubleshooting article, not to mention numerous other places like your own blogs
• The contrived questions are often too generic and not very useful in and of themselves
• It smacks of rep-mining, especially since even if it is a question that they actually had, they obviously already solved it, so asking the question is questionable whether it’s a generic hypothetical or very specific (too localized?)
• It opens the door to allow everybody to post question-answer pairs to any every problem they can conceive of. This means that the site could be flooded with simple, pointless questions
• One of the tenets of the site is that users are expected to have put in some effort in solving the problem they have before asking, and there reason that there exists a delay before you can accept your own answer: it is assumed that you do not know the solution and must continue trying as well as to give other users a chance to answer it, but these questions don’t conform to that expectation at all

(I’ll admit that there are times when simply typing up the question causes something to click, allowing for the solution to be found, but when that happens, why post the question at all if you no longer have the problem? Just cancel the post and if you really, really feel that the problem is common or at least noteworthy, then post it on a/the blog.)

Is this to be allowed? I think that posting questions simply for the sake of answering it does not belong here (that’s what blogs are for), and users should be required to wait some time before even answering their own question just like they do to accept it.