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I posted an answer (pointing to another question already asked) but when I hit submit, I saw my answer appear as a comment to the question instead.

I tried it a couple of times and still the same result. The answer gets eaten up and is transformed into a comment.

Is this a bug?

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5 Answers 5

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Trivial answers containing a link to another question in the network are automatically converted to comments on the question, with the message

Trivial answer converted to comment

Poking some folks about perhaps a wee bit more indication that that happens, looked like a bug to me at first too.

23 Mar 2023: We updated the warning message for the poster so they are more likely to realize what happened to their answer when it got converted to a comment by the system. This links to the deleted answers help page, which we'll be updating with a brief explanation of what happens when an answer is converted to a comment.

Toast notice with the text "Your answer has been automatically converted to a comment. Learn more"

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  • 39
    I would say that if it confuses those who know about it, it's probably not good UI design :)
    – Daniel DiPaolo
    Commented Jul 18, 2011 at 23:08
  • 23
    @dan well, we really want these users who post "answers" that are short links to other SE, Inc questions to ... stop ... so it's either do this, or have your "answer" downvoted and/or deleted.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Jul 18, 2011 at 23:10
  • 4
    @Daniel - I didn't actually know about it. I agree its confusing, tweaking that a bit if I can.
    – Kevin Montrose
    Commented Jul 18, 2011 at 23:11
  • 2
    I've updated the list of current automatic content modifications to include this.
    – user7116
    Commented Jul 18, 2011 at 23:15
  • 24
    @Jeff apologies, what would be helpful is to display a message at the top explaining what's happened, and a link to a faq page explaining similar behaviour and desired usage. I know I for one would be too lazy to read it until I do something that I get notified is undesired.
    – Michael
    Commented Jul 18, 2011 at 23:43
  • 3
    @Jeff, Is this something which could be relaxed on Meta? I understand the utility on Stack Overflow, etc, but here -- when users ask if something is off-topic, for example -- I have thought a one sentence explanation and a link to a similar question would suffice??
    – M. Tibbits
    Commented Jul 20, 2011 at 4:08
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    This is poor. With 91k rep on SO I'm sure I've got the hang of answering questions...
    – gbn
    Commented Jul 21, 2011 at 10:50
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    @Jeff can you explain why you dont want short answers (I take it this is what is meant by trivial) that link to an answer to another question. This is why I want the faq because I'm relatively new and don't understand this. I've tried searching meta and found one understandable reason mentioned here meta.stackexchange.com/questions/17447 for answers like "why don't you post it over here" but is that really common? The most common reason I would have thought is linking to an answer that answers the question which this meta question says is ok meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21270
    – Michael
    Commented Jul 22, 2011 at 23:54
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    @Jeff if this behaviour was mainly intended for "why don't you post it over here" or "I think your question is similar to" then why not exclude links to answers from this behaviour so that only answers with links to questions or faq pages etc are automatically converted to a comment.
    – Michael
    Commented Jul 22, 2011 at 23:58
  • 6
    Can we do this for all answers where the link is more than 10% of the total answer length, for any link (not just internal links)? A link is not an answer - it's a pointer to an answer, perhaps, but not an answer.
    – Pollyanna
    Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 23:21
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    @JeffAtwood, can you post that as an answer so I can downvote you? Sometimes the answer is just short.
    – Ben
    Commented Jan 25, 2012 at 15:51
  • 3
    I find it amusing that even if I am unable to comment on a question I can answer trivially, and thus still comment. An oversight if you ask me.
    – scape
    Commented Oct 16, 2012 at 14:42
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    @JeffAtwood What happened to letting the community decide whether an answer was good enough to be one or not? Now you're allowing Skynet to make that decision and it fails just like it did in Terminator.
    – The Muffin Man
    Commented Mar 27, 2013 at 18:25
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    @Nick While I'm also frustrated by the feature, the community is really bad at voting on things like this. People definitely upvote trivial answers. People upvote answers that are explicitly copies of answers from other questions. And even high-rep users sometimes post things that are too trivial. The one time I ran into this, I realized I was indeed doing a bad job of summarizing what I was linking to. It's just the implementation that's problematic.
    – Cascabel
    Commented Apr 6, 2013 at 17:33
  • 2
    So, actually, users having less than 50 rep can comment, but they must post an aswer with a link and their comment is very short. I think it should be placed in FAQ under 'How can I make comments having less than 50 rep'.
    – Cjxcz Odjcayrwl
    Commented Dec 20, 2013 at 13:36
156

This feature is really undesirable. Some questions may be answered perfectly well in a couple of sentences.

"var is deprecated, and you forgot the $ in $idgen" is perfectly acceptable as an answer, especially when I explicitly didn't want to just throw the full completed code snippet at the OP.

It doesn't help that the conversion kept the answer-style decoupled link syntax, which comment Markdown doesn't support; thus my post was (a) completely mangled, (b) not posted where I wanted it to be posted, and (c) not posted where it belonged.

At 28.5k rep, I know what an answer looks like and what a comment looks like. Stop second guessing me!

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  • 7
    The problem was that you were linking to another Stack Overflow question. If you'd linked to the original source then it might have OK.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Jul 20, 2011 at 13:16
  • 5
    I'm with you. It needs weighted for, say, user rep
    – gbn
    Commented Jul 21, 2011 at 10:49
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    Just to add - if you're linking to another Stack Overflow question, maybe you should be voting to close as a duplicate.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Aug 9, 2011 at 11:52
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    @ChrisF: No. You should vote to close as a duplicate when the question is a duplicate; no other time. That's why it's called "closing as a duplicate".
    – Lightness Races in Orbit
    Commented Aug 9, 2011 at 11:57
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    I did say maybe - I agree it's not always the case, but it's usually a good indication.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Aug 9, 2011 at 12:01
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    @ChrisF: In fact, 100% of the time when I'm linking to another SO question, it's not a duplicate. Because if it's a duplicate, I vote to close as such. :)
    – Lightness Races in Orbit
    Commented Aug 9, 2011 at 12:06
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    bah, this kinda sucks ... my "answer" is in fact to point them to the other SO answer which answered it much better. Now it can't be chosen as the answer to the question - this will only suggest people that they should copy/paste the other answer.
    – Joel Martinez
    Commented Aug 13, 2011 at 21:43
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    In this case, the other answer didn't answer the question at hand. "You need a linker" was the answer. The link was for additional information -- essentially, answering the OP's next question.
    – Lightness Races in Orbit
    Commented Aug 24, 2011 at 11:42
  • 15
    I'm with you. This is incredibly annoying and disgustingly paternalistic. I'm going to avoid contributing to stackoverflow in the future since it evidently already knows the answers better than I do.
    – c-urchin
    Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 15:40
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    StackOverflow got mad at you for the stuff between the <!-- and -->.
    – Mateen Ulhaq
    Commented Nov 24, 2011 at 5:56
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    @muntoo: No, I added that on my third attempt.
    – Lightness Races in Orbit
    Commented Nov 24, 2011 at 14:08
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    Can't agree more, I'm tired of SO second-guessing me and insulting my intelligence...
    – HighCommander4
    Commented Apr 10, 2012 at 21:32
  • 1
    I think the point is to get more self-contained answers, not just links to other questions. You may, for example, copy the relevant parts of the page you are linking to.
    – Emil Vikström
    Commented Aug 21, 2012 at 8:47
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    @Catfish: To be fair, "I found how to get all of the results from this answer stackoverflow.com/questions/14829130/…" is not an answer.
    – Lightness Races in Orbit
    Commented Apr 16, 2014 at 13:54
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    @Catfish: Links are not answers, and that's been done to death on Meta already. If your question turned out to be the same as some other question, vote to close it as a duplicate. If an answer to a marginally-related question helped, link to it but also quote enough information so that it makes sense on your question. Show the final code. Don't just write "I got my answer here" as that is not an answer but a blog entry. :)
    – Lightness Races in Orbit
    Commented Apr 16, 2014 at 15:45
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This is terrible. If it's another question on the same site, then I get it- it's a duplicate, effectively. But if the question is on a different site, then it's not a duplicate and the questioner could not have found it by searching the site he was on.

Come on guys, this is definitively unnecessary.

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  • 5
    It's still a trivial answer, regardless of whether it's a viable duplicate. If you're going to answer a question, answer it with a real answer - not just a link.
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Jul 2, 2012 at 14:31
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    @jadarnel27: It was a real answer. That answer happened to be both short and contain a link to another question. But it was still an answer.
    – DeadMG
    Commented Jul 2, 2012 at 14:46
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    Here's the answer that's typically link to concerning link-only answers. The most important bit (I think) is this: "...the question "answer" should actually contain an answer. Not just a bunch of directions towards the answer."
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Jul 2, 2012 at 14:53
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    @jadarnel27: It was a perfectly good answer. The link just happened to add more content.
    – DeadMG
    Commented Jul 3, 2012 at 10:21
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    Sorry, I wasn't trying to say your specific answer wasn't helpful, or even correct. It's just not a good answer answer for Stack Exchange - because it makes people chase the answer (through the link) and it's quite possible that it won't be useful to future visitors (due to link rot).
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Jul 3, 2012 at 12:15
  • @JoshDarnell are you suggesting we should duplicate answers when they are relevant to a different question?
    – Calimo
    Commented Jul 24, 2020 at 19:39
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Post your answer without the link; then edit in the link.

For example post this answer:

According to the dev lead at company X this is not currently possible.

Then edit the answer to this:

According to the dev lead at company X [this is not currently possible](https://stackoverflow.com/link-to-relevant-post).

Linked example of this working.

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3

I didn't notice the conversion, and posted the same link three times, and now I can't delete those comments because of lack of reputation. Sorry to say, but that's quite absurd. At least there should be a proper notification for what happened.

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  • 1
    I know it's not ideal but as the accepted answer above states, when your answer is automatically converted to a comment, three things happen: 1) You're redirected to the comment (via an anchor link). 2) The comment is highlighted. 3) A one-time message is shown below the comment telling you what happened (like this).
    – 41686d6564
    Commented Jun 22, 2021 at 7:35
  • That said, I suppose you're referring to your comments under this question (right?) I just flagged the two extra ones as no longer needed. They should be deleted soon.
    – 41686d6564
    Commented Jun 22, 2021 at 7:38
  • Yes, I'm referring to that question. That was quick, thanks. I didn't see any redirection, I believe. I could be wrong, I was just baffled about what happened... and not just once.
    – vfinn
    Commented Jun 22, 2021 at 7:52
  • 1
    You might be interested in this feature request asking for <50 rep users to be allowed to delete their own auto-generated comments. I've edited your case in so its argument for implementation is stronger.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Jun 22, 2021 at 9:01

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