I've just run into an answer which answers a question regarding a problem which apparently can be caused by a whole slew of causes. It seems that the community of users using the relevant technology has adopted the question as the place to post solutions when people run into the error mentioned in the title of that question. I guess the question is a canonical question of sorts.

At any rate, the answer is stating that the problem can be caused by a typo and gives a specific example of a typo that caused the problem for the user who posted the answer.

It seems to me that in light of the fact that we close questions where the problem was caused by a typo, there's a problem with accepting answers of this sort. A great deal of problems can be caused by typos. Are we supposed to be okay with people adding typo answers wherever a typo could be the cause? How many variations do we allow? I mean, typos come in all shapes and sizes, so once we allow it where does it stop?

(Although I'm using a specific answer as example, I'm looking for a more general discussion rather than only how to handle just this specific example.)

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    I don't think that answer is useful unless the OP's issue was a typo. In that case the question would be a candidate for closure with the "simple typographical error" close reason. I think the appropriate action would just be to downvote ("this answer is not useful") and move on, perhaps including an explanatory comment on why exactly it's not useful to others. – eddie_cat Oct 9 '14 at 1:59
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    That question is starting to look like a candidate for Protection, as many users are now piling on with related but not particularly good or helpful answers. However, I won't take that action myself because I'm no active in those tags and don't know the community there. I defer to someone from the [tag:.net] world... – Michael Berkowski Oct 9 '14 at 2:15
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    The answers though - meh, they're certainly not worthy of upvotes, but they do demonstrate possible solutions. I wouldn't personally start flagging them unless they are blatant restatings of one another (which does happen on questions like that). – Michael Berkowski Oct 9 '14 at 2:17
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    One problem could have many causes. There are many cases where we just don't know the solution or even what the real problem is yet, and having a question that says "This is happening, why?" followed by a hundred different answers (that could all possibly solve that problem) is a good thing, because there can be many different solutions and thus many people will find that single source of reference useful. – jay_t55 Oct 9 '14 at 6:54
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    That answer is bad because it is the exact same typo as in Armentage's 3 year old upvoted one... – Ben Voigt Oct 10 '14 at 0:43
  • @BenVoigt Good catch. I did not notice that. – Louis Oct 10 '14 at 0:46
  • Here's another "I had this problem and it was because I had a typo" answer: stackoverflow.com/a/26245747/1652962 – cimmanon Oct 10 '14 at 2:03

The number of times that a low voted answer actually answered my question is much bigger than the times the accepted answer answered my question.

In fact, many times the combination of all responses leads me to a solution.

So as long as the answer is an answer to the question leave it in.

I would even support leaving wrong answers as long as they include comments why they are wrong because those help me to understand what is going on as well and many times prevent me from going down the same/wrong path.


To add a bit more of an explanation so you do not have to dig into the comments too much: To me it is irrelevant whether or not it is a typo. It is too hard to define a typo that is 'just a typo' upfront, so it is best too leave that to the people (both 'asker' and 'answerers') to decide. We have a system for that: votes and flags.

Again: if the answer is an actual answer that can be helpful it should remain. If it is not, vote it down. If the question originated from a typo which is very unlikely to be found by someone looking for help; delete the question, it doesn't belong on this site.

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    Did you look at the answer in question? It was literally just "I accidentally typed two closing brackets!" If I went and posted several answers with spelling errors or accidental closing brackets in other places, missing backslashes, etc that could cause an error, would you consider those useful? – eddie_cat Oct 9 '14 at 13:04
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    @eddie_cat - I did look at the question (thank you very much). My response is not directly aimed at this single question/answer but more at the question/discussion topic on this page. (see the last line, did you read that? :)) Sometimes votes do their work and useless answers will disappear. – Erno de Weerd Oct 9 '14 at 13:17
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    But it seems like the question is about "typo" answers in general. :) I can't think of a time when it would be appropriate to answer a question with "this is caused by a typo" unless the typo was in the code posted by the OP... not about low voted answers in general – eddie_cat Oct 9 '14 at 13:35
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    @eddie_cat - all errors are caused by typos :) It is extremely hard to set a rule to decide, upfront, what typos are useful and which are not. I trust the votes to take care of that – Erno de Weerd Oct 9 '14 at 13:58
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    @ErnodeWeerd: Except for the ones that are caused by thinkos – Ben Voigt Oct 10 '14 at 0:44
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    Erno, I agree with @Ben. Not everything is a simple typo unless we have a different definition of typo. What is your definition of typo? – lpapp Oct 10 '14 at 15:34
  • @lpapp - you probably missed the smiley :) – Erno de Weerd Oct 10 '14 at 16:54
  • @ErnodeWeerd: no, I did not. What is your definition of the smile, there? That your sentence is unreasonable? If so, what point were you trying to make with that sentence? None, just confuse us? :) – lpapp Oct 10 '14 at 17:05
  • @lpapp - the first part of my comment to eddie_cat, the part before the :) is a joke. The part after it is not a joke. I added to my answer. (note to self to remember when on the bring of adding a joke: don't, this is why SO is much better than any plain old forum because I don't have to explain jokes and irony) – Erno de Weerd Oct 10 '14 at 17:09

I see what you mean...

  • Why doesn't do this code work? for (i = 0, i <= arrList.Count; i++)

and 25 answers

  • yeah me too I had , instead of ;

  • didn't work for me because i wasn't initialized

  • didn't work because I had > arrList

  • my arrList was empty

  • oh I had ++i


Come on, that's the most basic syntax debugging you can possibly imagine... that doesn't deserve 1 bit of internet space.


In my opinion: Not OK... 1 variation should only be allowed - that would be the correct answer for the particular question.

Currently, the community can separate good from bad answers by voting. This is the only thing we can do while an answer is an attempt to answer the question. It may not be a correct answer or it may be a me too but I had a different typo but it may not qualify for a spam, naa, or any other kind of flag.

If the actual cause of a typo error is already in an answer I think the question is then solved and since it was just a typo we can safely just vote to close


and that's it because closed questions can't be answered. And in typo cases if they have an accepted answer or a significant amont of votes on a single answer it means that they are solved.


I would say that any answer that includes data which could be helpful for those seeking solutions to that, or similar, issues should be left and discoverable.

Even if the answer has misunderstood the question, they are likely to be found by people who are looking for the question they answered, if not the one which is asked. I've just used one not unlike it

How do I get Rails to exclude some bundled gems from plugin-loading?

There the lower answer, not the accepted answer, is higher voted, presumably because a lot of people had the same experience as me, stumbling over the question when looking for the second answer.

  • 100% agree. I'd say that this happens to me as much as half of the time. – Ruslan Oct 10 '14 at 16:17

The below opinion started out as a reply to the comment chain of @ErnoDeWeerd's answer, but grew large enough to be posted as a separate answer.

I think it is very important to consider the fact that some of these "typos" are not caused by people at all, but by tools, and thus can be a nightmare to debug and even find. I am not sure whether that was the case of the particular question quoted, but it very much looks like it. I've had Visual Studio do that to its auto-generated XML files quite a few times, and Subversion's diffs (with poorly designed SVN tools) are a whole other story that can make this problem an even bigger nightmare!

Personally, by now, I've learned (from experience) to manually check auto-generated files when such errors arise. But someone who runs into that issue for the first time could spend hours (or days) on it, only to feel very stupid when they actually find the problem later.

As such, I believe that additional answers with low votes at the bottom of a question don't do anyone any harm (more is better than less, right?), because it very well may save someone hours or days of frustration (I can't even count the number of times that happened to me).

In general, and I realize that saying this is way above my pay (read: reputation) grade, I do feel that this meta discussion is very abstract and high-level. The bottom line (the way I see it) is that the purpose of StackOverflow is to help people solve programming problems and find answers quickly & easily. Programming is a complex topic and a problem could have an infinite number of causes - tooling and PBKAC no exceptions. Whereas I will be the first one to agree that useless "giv mi teh codez" questions only clutter the site and don't serve anyone any use, less useful answers shouldn't be judged in the same light as they can still be useful and in most cases don't stand in the way at all as they end up at the bottom.

In cases where an answer is completely useless, I feel that flagging and down-voting do their job very well (isn't that, after all, their purpose?)

(Above is only my opinion from using the site for many years)

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