I've read a lot of answers in the last few days that predominantly recommend a non-hack answer to the question, but also save themselves with a paragraph or two containing some kind of hack.
Here are two examples:
How to shred papers/letters without using a shredder machine
In this example, the primary part of the answer (and the associated picture) is not a life-hack, rather a suggestion of a product to use. Then there are two hack suggestions, followed by another standard solution.
How to preserve a soda's fizziness?
Here, the primary solution is to buy a product designed for this purpose.
The answers provide some useful information, so I hardly consider them works of evil. But I see this type of answer more and more often. I don't entirely understand why people are including standard solutions in their answers, yet I feel I shouldn't down-vote them because the answers typically contain some hack info.
Possible Solutions
How should we handle this? I feel these answers present a danger to a beta site that is struggling with its scope. I see a few options:
- Ignore the answers, provided they contain some kind of hack somewhere within them.
- Down-vote them and leave a comment, explaining that the standard solution has no place in the answer.
- Edit the answer to remove the standard solution, leaving a comment explaining the action.
In many cases, the questions are quite legitimate and so we can't place the blame there.
