If it were a wood chipping forum/chatroom, sure, but it's a programming Q&A... people might need the answer in the future.
If you have the answer but would rather the person not do it, just put a disclaimer on top of your answer.
If the question/answer combo is way too specific that there's no chance someone is going to to benefit from it the future, maybe it should die, like other posters said.
A common one I come across is people trying to track who's online/offline with window.onbeforeunload.
The answer is always "that's not reliable, you can't really use it for this".
A good answer mentions the alternatives - storing the user's last activity and considering them logged out after X minutes, using websockets for a presence channel, etc.
I see no reason to avoid the "you can accomplish your underlying goal in a better way" answers.
> The answer is always "that's not reliable, you can't really use it for this".
Only if the question is "Is window.onbeforeunload reliable to track online/offline users?"
In every other case, that should be a disclaimer on top of an answer to the actual question.
Maybe future users don't need 100% reliability for some reason. Maybe they're just trying to find out if something like onbeforeunload even exists.
Sure, showing better ways is fine. As long as there is an actual answer somewhere (preferably with the disclaimer), instead of cute but condescending non-answers like [1].
> Only if the question is "Is window.onbeforeunload reliable to track online/offline users?"
We're gonna have to disagree on this.
That's like me asking "how do I get to this restaurant", and you give me directions to the place that burned down a year ago without mentioning that. Useless, and infuriating when I drive a half hour to discover it.
I know it's impolite to say that here, but if you actually read the rest of my reply, you'd see that in my opinion the best answer for a Q&A site would be "The restaurant burned a year ago, but it was at 450, Blahblah street". Maybe I didn't make it clear enough before, but I am saying it now.
Consider that the asker might just using the restaurant as a reference to some other place. Or someone "hearing" the answer in the future wanted to know the address to visit the ruins. The information might still be useful. Consider that you might not always know better.
If this were a chatroom or forum, fine, answer informally. But we're talking in the context of a Q&A webiste.
The most likely answer the OP in that scenario needs is "it burned down". If they want to visit the ruins, they can easily say so in the comments and likely get an updated answer (or they can mention it in the original question; perhaps they'll think to do it the next time around when they've got an unusual requirement).
