As you can see on this question, the person asks something that does not really explain what he actually needs. He just gave the code and asked.

I want when user click the submit, the subscribe will be change to subscribed.

There is a lot of objects in his code named subscribe: I saw someone answered the question while the person asking hasn't yet cleared up his question.

How we can handle this? What if the question wasn't edited by the person asking and it was left vague for future viewers?

Here is the question transcript in case it is edited or deleted:

my js

    //change attr to 'subscribed' when user click }); html



thanks @AstroCB –  Mahan Aug 14 at 1:56
The correct way to handle this is to close it as 'Too broad' or 'Unclear what you're asking' and only answer it afterwards. Obviously there are those that can't wait to get some of that sweet rep but aside from downvoting there is nothing you can do against it. –  Jeroen Vannevel Aug 14 at 1:57
@Mahan Not a problem. –  AstroCB Aug 14 at 1:57
@JeroenVannevel what if we have this feature that can make a question unanswerable until the question becomes clear? well maybe a moderator can do that for us? –  Mahan Aug 14 at 2:00
How do you determine an unclear answer other than the way it is now: 5 people voting that it is unclear? –  Jeroen Vannevel Aug 14 at 2:01
@Mahan That feature is closing. It does exactly what you just described: the ability to close becomes available at 3k rep (which you have) and a question is closed with 4 votes, preventing answers from being posted. –  AstroCB Aug 14 at 2:02
well if you are doing all the possible answers because of the vague question will lead to a destructive edits maybe a database corruption? (just an exaggeration) –  Mahan Aug 14 at 2:04

1 Answer 1

up vote 1 down vote accepted

You're right: this is a common problem.

You should definitely downvote vague answers in the same way you downvote vague questions.

We do, however, have a special mechanism just for this: closing. You should vote to close questions like these as "too broad" or "unclear what you're asking." Closing the question will prevent answers from being posted to them until the OP fixes up their question and it is reopened.

That prevents rep-seeking answerers from posting poor answers to unfinished questions, which is your objective here.

However vague answers (and sometimes they are spot on) do allow others to discover a topic and may even allow the op to understand his problem or the details he is missing. This could also happen by comments, but then again those are as well quickly moved to chat (and too small to alaborate). –  eckes Dec 4 at 3:27

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