What is meta? ×
Meta Stack Exchange is where users like you discuss bugs, features, and support issues that affect the software powering all 134 Stack Exchange communities.

Reference - I down voted because it gives the impression that a mailto link sends email directly.

However, there are many situations like this where the asker is asking for help implementing a bad solution or anti pattern (or something not do-able).

In such a case, should I offer my advice/alternative solution in the comments or should I put it in as an answer? What is recommended by SO?

share|improve this question
    
FYI, the answer that is referred in your post has been updated by the OP. –  Aziz Shaikh Nov 26 '12 at 11:32

1 Answer 1

up vote 3 down vote accepted

If there isn't a "correct" answer posted, then you could almost certainly begin by first posting an answer of your own. Once yours is posted, you could then leave a comment to the poster of the other answer addressing the issue. Comments are after all intended to help the poster clarify a question or improve an answer, so leaving a note would be helpful.

As far as downvoting goes, that's really up to you. Some people like to silently downvote bad answers and move on, while others are happy to try to help the poster improve. If I downvote and leave a comment, I try to make it a point to revisit the post later to remove the downvote if the issue is resolved. Oftentimes, this happens in response to a user making the edit and then asking me to review. Hope this helps!

I left the following comment, to help clarify further:

Hi atmd, I think the downvote is because it sounds like you're suggesting the developer can cause mail to be sent automatically simply by using the "mailto:" link. This is not true, as a mailto link simply opens the default email client, requiring the user to manually fill out and manually send the email. You could fix your answer to clarify what you mean, which may avoid more downvotes or even reverse them. Good luck!

share|improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/156538/how-should-i-offer-alternatives-to-a-bad-solution-in-a-question
meta.stackexchange.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-52
59491
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:A2H2SUFPN3ND4Y2XQZLA4WGQDQJMA5FS
<urn:uuid:65c62455-6115-42d6-9df5-b423e9354150>
2014-12-28T09:28:33Z
198.252.206.140
sha1:5MUUZ2WO5K6HN2LJGJYCZRWAV2EGDR6T
<urn:uuid:52599a12-67cb-4bab-8424-a5fcd5344d0e>
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/156538/how-should-i-offer-alternatives-to-a-bad-solution-in-a-question
response
<urn:uuid:34a52aed-40a6-4511-a834-6568ae75c94a>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-231-17-201.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-52
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for December 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf