First time asker here.

There is a question on Stack Overflow that has a bounty for 400 reputation points. I have answered the question after user Leyenda. Leyenda's answer is actually false (it does not work the way he/she suggests) and if you follow the detailed example I provide in my answer you will notice that Leyenda's answer does not work(something confirmed by another user), she/he was very close to the correct answer however. In any case it got upvoted twice.

I am not asking for votes. I am very curious however, as OData security is a topic that I am very much interested in, what can one do in such case to protect the correct answer? Flagging is not (to my understanding) the right tool: Leyenda's answer was not spammy or something. Just wrong. Downvoting only goes half the way. People browsing through quickly and not bothering to check should not be voting on answers (I am assuming the two upvotes were due to this).

I just want to stress that I mean no offence to anyone (especially not Leyenda who, as I mentioned in my answer, was close to the correct solution) and, honestly, I have been guilty of not being very careful in the past. I am just asking for ways to handle such situations, and maybe provoke some discussion on fast upvoting and downvoting.

I know that accepted answers are not always the most upvoted ones. This is a good thing in my opinion; the community gets to pick the right one from the bunch. This situation however is different as the community picked an obviously (anyone who actually checks will see) wrong answer.

I did comment on the wrong answer and the other user that later confirmed mine also commented, and the OP did not fix his answer. The issue was that even when I downvoted, the two answers had equal votes. I think the problem is that there is no way to confirm that someone that up-votes or down-votes really knows what he\she is doing. MAYBE, perhaps, the reputation required to vote up or down should be increased or a user should be able to vote up or down only after he\she answered at least an X amount of votes.

I think the OP of that question will check the answer as careful as you did. –  Bolu Aug 5 at 14:15
I know that accepted answers are not always the most upvoted ones. This is a good thing in my opinion; the community gets to pick the right one from the bunch. Why do you assume that the community is going to pick the right answer? It's entirely possible that the correct answer is exactly the one that is the least popular by the community. –  Brandin Aug 5 at 18:10
@Brandin usually the community gets it right, there are some egregious examples out there where this is not the case. Most I have seen are old. –  Shafik Yaghmour Aug 5 at 18:40
@Brandin I was speaking theoretically; my question is exactly about a situation where the wrong answer got upvoted. Since posting this though, the votes changed. –  SKleanthous Aug 5 at 18:41
@ShafikYaghmour Yeah I'm just questioning the implicit idea that votes makes correctness. This is not even the idea of SO. See here - It says "good" answers are upvoted and rise to the top, it never says "correct" answers necessarily rise to the top. In fact, one could make a serious attempt to post the "worst" correct answer to a SO question. That is, the answer which is objectively most correct but which has objectively received the worst rating from the community. –  Brandin Aug 5 at 18:46
Slightly tangential to your question here, but I really think you should remove that last block from your answer, where you discuss the other answers. Comments on the other answers should be written as ... comments on the other answers. –  David Wallace Aug 5 at 23:45
I think it is the very same case of mine! In my case, I'm not sure if the OP will apply the bounty, since the grace period ends in 7 hours, but it possibly would be a case to get the Disciplined badge. –  falsarella Aug 5 at 23:46
Worth noting that the situation worked itself out. @SKleanthous's answer is accepted and highest voted. –  Laizer Aug 6 at 10:25
Downvote and leave a comment indicating why the answer is wrong. If you have more than 1000 points or so, don't worry too much about revenge downvoting -- you can afford to take a hit if it comes to that. –  Hot Licks Aug 6 at 23:30
@HotLicks If you want to avoid "revenge downvoting" can't you just leave in your comment a note like "It's not my downvote btw" (maybe it was your downvote but for the purpose of avoiding revenge downvoting you just claim otherwise). –  Brandin Aug 8 at 16:45

8 Answers 8

up vote 55 down vote accepted

If you think that the answer is so wrong it's dangerous leave a comment explaining why you think it's wrong.

The OP will get notification of the comment so they can fix or delete it (unless it's the accepted answer of course).

Other users will see your comment and, hopefully, come to the same conclusion as you.

The only caveat is that I'd make your down-vote and the adding of the comment relatively far apart so that there is less chance that the OP will associate the two and perhaps engage in a little revenge down-voting. I certainly wouldn't mention that you down-voted in the comment itself.

What can you do when downvoting and commenting does not work even though other people commented as well? –  SKleanthous Aug 5 at 14:59
@SKleanthous - that's all you can do. Don't flag it - we decline flags that state that the answer is wrong. –  ChrisF Aug 5 at 15:00
@ChrisF are you saying there is no solution for these kind of situations? Lately I came across a question, OP was asking how can access instance variable of a UIViewController from another UIViewController. The only and accepted answer advise to OP creating new instance of the UIViewController FirstViewController *fvc = [[FirstViewController alloc] init];. Which is not correct... –  mohacs Aug 5 at 15:19
In the comment I said this is not correct, you are just creating new instance… etc. The person replied to me and said “what are you talking about, I am using this for years.”. I have flagged the comment as “not constructive” after awhile it is deleted. The problem is wrong answers remains there. And the only hope, if some others came across to same answer and leave comment to tell this is wrong may the person will take the chance to lose +25 rep and delete the answer? –  mohacs Aug 5 at 15:20
@mohacs Duty calls. –  Robert Harvey Aug 5 at 17:18
@mohacs, did you write your own, correct answer? If the incorrect answer is the only answer, then there is something you can do: write a correct answer. –  Jason Aug 5 at 17:29
@Jason, you are right I did not but now I am thinking I should. –  mohacs Aug 5 at 17:32
@RobertHarvey point taken. –  mohacs Aug 5 at 17:32
"I certainly wouldn't mention that you down-voted in the comment itself." If they have a downvote and you also added a comment about the incorrectness, then they just might guess that you did. I think if more people were more open about their downvotes and the reason behind it, there would be less revenge-downvoting. So the explicit advise to downvote without telling seems odd to me, especially coming from a mod. –  GolezTrol Aug 5 at 18:18
@SKleanthous That's the point of the voting system: a wrong answer is voted down by other users and a right answer is voted up. A comment can be additionally useful, but in fact is more useful for the answerer in helping understand why they are getting downvotes! –  Joe Aug 5 at 22:39
I downvote and comment all the time. In my experience, people rarely correct their answers. But they often delete them once their score drops below zero. They never ever delete them if the score is above zero. –  usr Aug 5 at 22:51
@usr "never ever delete them" is overegging it a bit. I've only recently been able to see posts deleted by others and, perhaps for that reason, have noticed quite a few with a net positive score. –  pnuts Aug 5 at 23:19
@GolezTrol Unfortunately explaining your downvote does not help most of the time. It sounds logical to explain it, and I did it most of the time, but I just became a target for attacks by the answerer. Mostly verbal attacks, only a few of them are crazy enough to revenge downvote. I am not happy to say that, but explaining your downvotes on SO normally only gets you into a comment-war, or gets completely ignored. Not worth it and I stopped doing it (there are exceptions, but the rule became DON'T EXPLAIN instead of EXPLAIN for me). –  kapa Aug 6 at 7:07
I've had some revenge votes once or twice, but usually not. In even more cases, people either deleted their answer, sometimes with a comment like "Fair point, I'll remove it". Also, if they improve their answer because of the comment, they can also tag you in a reply-comment, so you can validate the edit and retract the downvote. If you do that, I think it will motivate people. –  GolezTrol Aug 6 at 11:12
It doesn’t pay off thinking about revenge votes. You may leave a comment without downvoting and the addressee might still associate someone elses downvote with your comment. I’ve also seen people going mad about the comment itself even without getting any downvote… –  Holger Aug 7 at 18:14

The way to deal with this is:

  • Down vote any incorrect answer.
  • Leave a comment explaining why you believe the answer is incorrect.
  • Check if the poster corrects the answer or perhaps give you an explanation of why they believe it is correct. If the poster fixed the incorrect statements in the answer so that it is now correct, consider to remove the down vote.
  • In case there are no good, correct answers, consider to leave an answer on your own. In your answer you can also mention why method "x" is incorrect/unsafe etc.

Flagging is not appropriate for incorrect, yet on-topic answers.

I always appreciate a comment when receiving downvotes however they are optional and in my experience quite rare someone actually tells you why they have downvoted. I agree though a downvote on an answer should be justified. –  vba4all Aug 5 at 15:16
@mehow Only trawled through your last four but three of these seem to have explanations. –  pnuts Aug 5 at 23:07
"If the poster fixed the incorrect statements in the answer so that it is now correct, consider to remove the down vote." I would change this from "consider to remove" into "remove". If you down voted an incorrect answer and the answer is no longer incorrect, remove the down vote. There is no reason to keep it. –  DrV Aug 8 at 10:45
@DrV An answer can be correct, yet a poor answer for other reasons: it can be confusing, misleading, have poor formatting, poor language, irrelevant rants and so on. Hence "consider". –  Lundin Aug 8 at 10:47

This is sad, but you can do absolutely nothing except of downvote wrong answer and hope that other people will downvote it. Because I think it is wrong, I will try to explain why.

I do not understand why SO moderators think that it is ok to have wrong answers here. But wrong new answers are not really as bad as wrong (or outdated) old answers with many upvotes. And there are a lot of them. The problem with them is that mostly people who know the answer can understand that the answer is wrong or does not make sense anymore. Inexperience users will just go with a flow and take 100+ upvoted wrong answer, not checking that there is correct answer with 2 upvotes.



I think we should spend some time to remove wrong answer. Otherwise we can ended up with something like this:

Some guy in 1-st century asks:

What is a lighting, how is it generated?

Some guy in 1-st century answers:

You know, there is a God Zeus, he has a lot of lighting bolts in his hands and when he is pissed of, he throws them. Here is how it works:

enter image description here

Then during 10+ centuries hundreds of people thought that this is correct (or may be added something similar with their different God) and upvoted it.

But then in 18-th century Faraday (I am most probably wrong with date and person) answers:

No guys, it is actually electricity and not an old man who throws light bolts. Here is how it approximately works: enter image description here

Not a lot of people can grasp it, and out of few of them, only some cares to upvote, so for this answer we ended up with +500 for Zeus who throws lightbolts and +5 for a more appropriate explanation of electricity. Do we really want it to happen just because long time ago someone was wrong?

This is why I think that SO have to delete wrong/outdated answers. Otherwise some people will believe that Zeus throws lighting bolts.

Trouble with that is, who to set up as the omniscient infallible arbitrator? Haven't met anyone meeting the rigorous standards for that position yet. –  Deduplicator Aug 6 at 22:07
@Deduplicator you can not find a person who is good in all topics, but if on the site for programmers you can not find few programmers who are good in some topics, than may be this site is useless. The same way as you select moderators for spam, can be moderators to remove bad answers for particular topics. I think you were not looking good enough or your standards are too rigorous. In terms of C#: I am sure you can find pro people for any tag. –  Salvador Dali Aug 6 at 22:23
Deduplicator is right; "I do not understand why SO moderators think that it is ok to have wrong answers here" They don't! But who gets to decide which answers are right and which are wrong? You? Are you always right? Totally infallible? Or this "pro" you have in mind; who chooses "pro"s? You have to have a vote on this stuff, and that is why you should downvote an answer you think is wrong. Emphasis on you think. Just because you say "this answer is wrong" does not mean that everybody else necessarily agrees with you. Unfortunately this, like every other community action, is imperfect. –  Lightness Races in Orbit Aug 7 at 17:50
@LightnessRacesinOrbit surely not me, also I do have expertise in some topics, people do not have trust in me. I thought I explained in previous answer how you can find such people. Just because 1k people believe in Zeus I would rather listen to a scientist, even if he will be alone. As for where to find this people, I believe that you have expertise in C++, so I would trust you with your choice. I also trust Jon Skeet with his C# judgement, one of the php contributor in php tag, mongodb –  Salvador Dali Aug 7 at 19:11
@SalvadorDali: I'm not always right, either. You seem to have been brought up thinking in boolean, black-and-white terms but reality is not like that. –  Lightness Races in Orbit Aug 9 at 15:09
@SalvadorDali Do you think Jon Skeet has never ever made a mistake? If so, I hate to break it to you, but he's not omnipotent. He's fallible. He may make less mistakes than other people, but he's still imperfect. He also doesn't have the time to read every single C# post ever made to judge its quality; there's just too much there. Finally, not all posts can be stated as strictly right or wrong. Posts have value, and that value is on a scale. One person can consider a post helpful and another consider it unhelpful and they can both be right. –  Servy Aug 13 at 14:43
@Servy he make mistakes, but he is smart enough to realize his mistake and remove his answer, even if he gets 10 upvotes. Majority of other people either will be still telling that they are right or thinking that they go + 34 reputation and thus no point to remove. Yes, sometimes some posts can be valuable, but I am not speaking about such posts. I am speaking about Zeuses throwing lighting - absolutely wrong posts, which got upvotes. –  Salvador Dali Aug 13 at 18:59
@SalvadorDali And when Jon posts an incorrect answer people can comment on it to inform him of his mistake. When he deletes a correct answer by mistake people just don't see it, and therefore can't inform him of his error. –  Servy Aug 13 at 19:04
@Servy majority of questions do not require super knowledge to know whether they are right or wrong. So in my opinion it is better to remove them. Look at this: can you guess whether this is correct answer or no? I really hope that your expertise can tell that this is a joke and should be removed. And a lot of wrong questions are super easy to know that they are wrong (if you spent some time learning that language). If someone is not sure that the post is wrong - he should not remove it. –  Salvador Dali Aug 13 at 19:13
@SalvadorDali If it's super obvious that a post is wrong then it should be getting lots of downvotes and no upvotes. If the post is wrong but it's getting upvotes then that tells you it's not obviously wrong. –  Servy Aug 13 at 19:15
@Servy look one more time at this answer: and please answer here. How obvious it is for you that it is wrong and does not answer the question? Then try to find a few people in you company and ask them the same question. Sorry, but we do not leave in Just Word. Telling you one more time my Zeus analogy. May be it was not clear that Zeus has nothing to do with lighting 1k years ago, but this does not mean that psychics books should study this as an alternative view of electricity. –  Salvador Dali Aug 13 at 19:28
Boy are you going to look silly when Zeus strikes you down. –  Servy Aug 13 at 19:33
Boy are you going to look silly when you open physics book for 7-th grade. Have you checked answer about random element? Or you are still trying to justify the need for it on this site? –  Salvador Dali Aug 13 at 19:40

One potential reason answers get upvoted and accepted as correct is because while they might not be 100% correct, they helped whoever asked the question (and obviously future askers given the fact it has multiple upvotes) to get it answered. For example, if I ask how to implement a certain piece of code and somebody provides with good pseudocode, I will accept and upvote it. Is the code "right" in the sense that it will run if copied and pasted into an IDE - no, did it help me solve my problem - yes.

Another reason is that technology changes constantly and what was the right answer in 2011 could be wrong in 2014. Real example: How to create custom methods for use in spring security expression language annotations. The original answer from 2011 was accepted and upvoted, but if you scroll down there's a newer answer from 2013 and turns out Spring Security changed things around and the 2011 answer was no longer valid. In this case, I don't think the original answer should be voted down since the responder answered it correctly at the time it was asked.

Well, in my specific case, the answer that got upvoted did not work at all as the user suggested it. The user got close, but his\her understanding of the problem and functionality was not good enough. –  SKleanthous Aug 7 at 7:01
This is the correct answer. :) –  Don Branson Aug 22 at 18:56

I'm afraid this is a "me too" answer (the alternative was yet-another-duplicate-question), but I hope it adds an interesting perspective.

In this question: using boost condition variable

The accepted/upvoted answer is clearly wrong to someone with experience in this area, and clearly plausible to the naive.

The OP said "this does not work (my program hangs)" The author of the answer replied with a comment that said "Oh you should use this hack (timed wait on a condition variable)" and that was the end of the discussion. The answer itself was never fixed and is still wrong.

Yesterday I posted a correct answer, downvoted the incorrect answer, added comments that indicated what was wrong with it and asked the answerer to edit the code in the answer to (at least) reflect the conclusion reached in the comments.

So is there any other way to help the community process fix this situation before it misleads future SO users?

Just to be clear, I'm not in this for rep -- I'd gladly delete my answer if Nim fixes his. I just hate having to diagnose and fix this problem yet again the next time one of my co-workers finds this misleading answer.

Update: Nim updated his post, but he took a different approach, so I left my answer up, too. I.e: the process worked -- the answer is now usable.

"to be clear, I'm not in this for rep" -- you could post a community-wiki answer to unambiguously indicate this –  gnat Aug 13 at 15:59
@gnat CW is for posts that are a collaboration of multiple people, it's not just a tool to remove the rep from a post. –  Servy Aug 13 at 19:04
@gnat Ah, I never noticed the CW checkbox before. Is there some way to make it CW retroactively? –  Dale Wilson Aug 13 at 21:35
I just tested at one of my answers: when I click "edit", checkbox appears. That is, technically it's doable with edit. Just keep in mind that CW should be used for collaboration purpose, as @Servy points in comment above –  gnat Aug 21 at 7:37
@DaleWilson No, there is no way to make it retroactive. And once again, this is abusing CW for purposes it is specifically designed to not be used for. –  Servy Aug 21 at 14:04

It's my "fault", as I initially voted for the other user a few days before your post. I had the impression that was enough (his answer). However, I really wanted to see how/if it works and I created a test project of my own and got pretty much were you got.

You beat me to it as I as about to post an answer the same day. So, you could say it was voted in a hurry, but appearances can be deceiving as well (it looked good to go).

So, that was the reason behind the upvote. I couldn't change it after because the other user didn't edit his/her post anymore.


I'm relatively new to the answer scene (although long time reader), but I wanted to suggest/ask about the possibility of adding another type of flag to SO, one that questions the validity of an answer, so that perhaps (and I'm just spitballing here) that it can't be flagged as the accepted answer (or the current accepted answer flag is suspended) until it's validated by the answer-poster with respect to the comments that the validity-flagger has made. I know this opens the door up for people to challenge an answer, and most of the time probably isn't necessary, but I think some type of flag that is differentiated from the "spam/troll" flag is warranted.

Otherwise I think that @dcorking's answer above about making a small edit to fix it is warranted; people need to either see the correct answer, or know that the answer is not entirely correct.

This flag would be abused and take up the moderators time needlessly. The community can deal with bad answers just fine, there's no need for mods to deal with all of them –  Zach Saucier Aug 7 at 1:44
That's fine, but for the record I wasn't suggesting mods get involved. I was merely stating that users can flag a potentially incorrect answer for review, so the user who gave the answer could review it. If they don't, it's marked as "potentially correct", or something that tells the question-asker that it's not been verified. –  Tim S. Aug 7 at 2:36
Even still it introduces more unnecessary complexity. If it helped the OP solve their issue in some way or another, even if it's wrong, I don't think making a review que for it is necessary –  Zach Saucier Aug 7 at 3:52
Fair enough, just throwing out the idea. –  Tim S. Aug 7 at 4:11

If the answer is almost correct and you can make a small edit to fix it, then do so (and comment explaining why you made the change.)

You get rep/badge as an editor, the answerer gets rep for a good answer (and can fix their own knowledge), and readers of the question get to see yet another correct answer, and are saved from a dangerous error: everyone wins.

If your edit is rejected (as would have happened in this case), post a correct answer, if necessary poaching the 'nearly correct' answer text with attribution, as is encouraged by its Creative Commons license. Add a 'what not to do' paragraph to your answer. If you are still convinced that the other answer is harmful rather than merely ineffective, then downvote 'not useful' and explain why, but be prepared to be corrected.

Edit that significantly changes answer (from "quite wrong" to "correct") should not be made in first place and should be promptly rejected. Comment would be almost always better choice. –  Alexei Levenkov Aug 6 at 16:37
I partly agree @AlexeiLevenkov - though in general insignificant edits are discouraged. The OP suggested that the answer was 'nearly correct'. I think that is a great to time to exercise our edit privileges to make 'nearly correct' into 'correct'. –  dcorking Aug 6 at 16:54
I tend to reject edits for correctness when they show up in the suggested edits queue. My reasoning is that edits from other users should be about grammar or clarity. If an answer is wrong it should be downvoted and commented, and then you should post the correct answer. –  Austin Mullins Aug 6 at 17:07
The FAQ says: "When should I edit posts? Any time you feel you can make the post better, and are inclined to do so." The only suggestion there on when not to edit is when it is trivial. But I am no getting any upvotes, so I can only conclude that the FAQ doesn't tell the whole story. –  dcorking Aug 6 at 17:59
@dcorking: Trouble is, you are taking the answer with its load of upvotes and make it say what you think is right. That circumvents the voting process for letting the community decide, and might make the answerer look really bad if you didn't get some crucial detail. (Happens to the best of us sometimes) –  Deduplicator Aug 6 at 22:02
The answerer is notified when an edit is made to his/her post. Is they feel the edit doesn't make the answer better, they can reject the edit or roll it back. –  RubberDuck Aug 7 at 1:36
@Deduplicator: The possibility of an erroneous edit is why it is so important to explain in plain view why you made the edit. Any edit (not just ones for correctness) can accidentally make an answer worse. If the answer is already unpopular it doesn't matter. If it is popular, it will be read, right or wrong, and the reader can choose the better version. (Interesting - someone downvoted this answer that takes the natural interpretation of the help pages. Not upvoting I understand.) –  dcorking Aug 7 at 6:02
@ckuhn203: That presupposes that the answerer is still active though. Imho it's reasonable to think he can evaluate the edit then, yes. –  Deduplicator Aug 7 at 13:12

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