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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

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Meta Is it correct to downvote answers to bad questions?

I think there are two aspects here: What to do about offtopic questions? Being offtopic should trigger a close/flagging action. I see voting mostly related to the post quality (useful, shows some...

posted 2y ago by Alexei‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Alexei‭ · 2021-07-17T12:38:33Z (over 2 years ago)
I think there are two aspects here:

## What to do about offtopic questions?

**Being offtopic should trigger a close/flagging action**. I see voting mostly related to the post quality (useful, shows some research effort) which is relatively independent of being on-topic/offtopic.

## What to do about good answers to offtopic questions?

The most constructive thing to do in such cases is to try to propose/edit the question so it becomes "minimally" on-topic. Asking good questions is hard and it often happens for the asker to lack enough context to write an ontopic post.

If editing is not an option, **I would refrain from downvoting good-quality posts**. It contradicts the idea of voting up good content and voting down the bad one which is a very important principle of the entire Q&A system. 

When in doubt, one can always create a meta post to discuss a question being on-topic or not and what to do about it.