4 of 4 Restored somewhat overzealous editing

How should I handle a misleading and unhelpful answer?

I came across this question yesterday; nothing special, just one of thousands of blunder questions. The code posted in the question body does actually work, it cannot produce an error the OP claims it does. All you can do is vote to close it as off topic.

...Or answer it with an answer that presents as a solution code which is irrelevant to the question.

The answer.

A genuinely pointless answer that initially mentioned two irrelevant issues, eventually reduced to one that doesn't even remotely address the problem stated in the question. Absolutely useless even as a comment, let alone being an answer.

The worst part is when you see that, you can do literally nothing.

  • flag it for the review? A hilarious suggestion, given the review is for the grammar/language issues only.
  • flag it for the moderator's attention? The same, moderators do not judge the quality/correctness.
  • vote to close the question as off topic? Given you'll never get enough voters, it's a waste.
  • write an answer? An answer which doesn't answer the question but explains why it makes no sense? These boy scouts from the review queue will be happy to trample it over.
  • write a comment for the OP? Telling they are outright wrong? One could find a better way to waste their time.
  • downvote? Yea, -2 reputation is a devastating blow.

The despair.

I cannot tell you how helpless I feel in a situation like this. There is no legal way to reason with such an answer. There is no way to remove such a crap from the site. There is no way to stop Stack Overflow from spreading the misleading information contained in it. So I went loose and just tried to blackmail the author, telling him that his answer is a fraud (the comments I left under the question are now deleted but you can take my word). So it backfired on me. Again, I don't complain for that. But I wish to know, will Stack Exchange ever do something to help those who care for the quality?

On the one hand, I quite realize that if someone wants to run such a populous site, they have to harness the worst parts of the human nature: laziness (encouraging zero-effort questions), greed (for the rep points), vanity (for the badges and other decorations). If zero-effort questions were really banned, the number of questions would drop hundredfold. If those who answer zero-effort questions weren't encouraged, then the traffic will drop, so will the revenue. So….

But OK, let's take for granted that the site is run on the zero-effort questions, occasionally producing good content just as a side effect. But shouldn't be a there a tool to remove at least a blatant nonsense?

There should be a satisfactory way to deal with this kind of contribution. The key word is satisfactory. Means it should be fruitful. "Vote and move on" doesn't count. It should be feasible. Post on Meta every time it happens doesn't count. It should be something that works.

So, what a feature could be implemented that could help to wipe off topic questions and - especially - nonsense answers?