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A user posted this question yesterday.

Anyone with a little experience and not colour blind will spot the issue right away.

It was so trivial that I started by giving the solution as a comment, but someone eventually suggested to post it as an answer.

Often, a question can be answered simply with a comment.

How should these trivial questions/answers be handled? If the question can be answered with 2-3 lines of text in the comments, should they be flagged? If the answer is too short, it will be flagged and potentially be deleted.

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On StackOverflow, we have a close option "Just a typo". That would be applicable in this case. We don't have that here, since we're not specifially a programming board.

As such, it looks like answering it is what's the rules want us to do.

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Trivial questions aren't off-topic or banned or any of that, simply by virtue of being trivial.

The question you linked in particular, though, probably should have just been closed as either off-topic (belongs on SO) or as a "debug my code" question.

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An answer is an answer regardless of whether it fits in the comment box or if it seems trivial - if you can and are willing to answer it in a comment then you should do it as an answer.

Even short, simple questions are valid as long as they don't fall out of scope (in this case the only issue is it would have been put it in SO rather than GDSE and maybe be a debug style question instead of gaming related).

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Remember that you are talking to a completely new user. They don't know where they should post, how they should post, and what to expect from the site.

Personally, I would provide an answer as an answer, and then inform the user in the comments about not posting such trivial (and possibly off-topic) questions on GameDev.

Keep in mind that they're not spammers - They're just new users, desperate for some help, and don't know what to do and expect. Instead of blindly closing their questions, we should instead help them on their way.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I agree with most of what you say! However, I think off-topic question should not be answered, so that the user don't get incentives to ask such questions again. \$\endgroup\$
    – Vaillancourt Mod
    Nov 10, 2015 at 23:17

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