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I was reviewing first posts on Stack Overflow when this answer came up. I ended up doing "No action needed" as it was only a link, nothing to upvote or flag (so I thought).

It turned out to be a review audit and said I failed. Now on Ask Ubuntu we normally add a comment suggesting the answerer include the main points of the link, and let it go, seeing that it (usually) is helpful albeit not an "answer".

So my question is:

Does Stack Overflow do things differently when it comes to link only answers (seeing this was deleted)?

It would also be nice to know what I did wrong for that review. (Did it want me to add a comment? It appears Bill already added one...)

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marked as duplicate by Won't Feb 23 '13 at 4:56

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.

2  
There are too many options for which this question dupes: my own meta.stackexchange.com/questions/145900/…, meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144566/…, meta.stackexchange.com/questions/65277/…, meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8231/…, and so on. I'd have searched first. –  Dave Newton Feb 22 '13 at 23:53
    
I did look around, but honestly I find the search to be pretty awful. Last link is helpful BTW. –  ɥʇǝS Feb 23 '13 at 0:37
2  
Hmm, I searched for "link only answers", didn't seem that bad--YMMV. –  Dave Newton Feb 23 '13 at 0:51

2 Answers 2

up vote 7 down vote accepted

As per this answer, answers should have supporting details along with the link. Link-only answers are not welcome on Stack Overflow, if these details are missing.

Just imagine a scenario where the external site is down in future. The link-only answer will become meaningless. So ideally we should encourage them to post the relevant details in the answer along with the link.

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So what should I have flagged it as? Not an answer? –  ɥʇǝS Feb 22 '13 at 23:57
    
That is what people normally do here. I would rather prefer to comment on that post first and see if that person adds more details. And if there are no changes at all for quite some time, then I would flag it as a link only answer. In this case doing a "No action" required is not the correct way. Definitely there needs some action. –  iDev Feb 23 '13 at 0:01
1  
@Seth Also, if you are simply wanting to avoid getting caught by an audit, but you don't want to perform any actions on the post for whatever reason, you could also simply "skip" it. (perhaps you are out of flags, for example, and someone already commented on it) –  Andrew Barber Feb 23 '13 at 0:26
    
@Seth An alternative of flagging it as not-an-answer (which may get rejected later), could be to just down-vote it, leaving a comment suggesting improvement. –  Jack Feb 23 '13 at 5:13

Answers should provide sufficient detail to answer the question, with links to external sites used only as additional references.

Link-only answers to off-site locations mean that the answer becomes meaningless if the external site is unavailable for some reason (for instance, the site is down or the page is moved, as happens frequently even with links to MSDN topics). They are also not searchable here, as the content isn't here to be indexed.

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