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Code Reviews: ‘it's fine’
You look over a post on Code Reviews, and you don't find any problems. Should you post an ‘it's fine’ answer, stay silent, or do something else?
Seems to me there's some value in having a signal that n people have reviewed this code and found no issues; better for the asker to see that than to have their question go zombie with no feedback, right? But maybe it matters which people have reviewed this code—maybe you trust the reviews of high-rep users more, or there are particular users that you know and trust/distrust?
On the other hand, maybe an ‘it's fine’ answer with no explanations of what's good isn't actually all that valuable to people, regardless of who posted it? Maybe we want to de-emphasize the identity of the reviewer and focus on the code and the potential issues with it?
I think we should try to come to some sort of consensus on this (which may or may not be the Code Review.SE consensus) and add that to our Help documents.
1 answer
Put it in a comment if it's just "It's fine, no problems here".
As with most answers that aren't substantial enough to warrant their own answer post, I'd say to just leave a comment. As you said, knowing that n people find it fine has value in itself, but probably not enough value to warrant n answers.
Put it in an answer if you add further details
Conversely, if you add further details to your "it's fine", such as optimization suggestions or just plain analysis on what was done well, then you should make it into its own answer.
Overall though, avoid just saying "It's fine"
"It's fine" is a very loose term. Even if the code runs perfectly fine, there are probably still some points of improvement that you can point out. Maybe there is a faster sorting algorithm that they should be using. Maybe their interface, while working fine at the moment, isn't easily extendable. There are loads of things to say beyond "It's fine", whether it be in the comments or in an answer.
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