Request to add answer structure close to the answering field

Question

Coming from this post, I'd like to address this as a feature request.

What is it about?

Lowering the threshold that people might experience when wanting to answer new questions. I have the feeling, and my own personal experience adds to that aswell, that new users do not always have a good vision about what they should address in an answer to a question.

How do I think it can be solved?

I can think it can be solved by adding how a basic structure of an answer might look like. Points that could be on the list are things like Readability, Maintainability and Performance. This should give users some basic guidance as to how to fill their answers, obviously the answer itself still needs to contain a review of the code in question. An emphasis on adding headers to the answer structure neither can hurt, I, for once, didn't know they existed until very recently.

How to actually implement it?

I do not know whether this is possible, but I was thinking about adding a text box approximately close to the answering field, such that people will be able to read it when starting to write an answer. I disagree with adding it in the actual answer field itself, as it should be presented as a guideline and not a mandatory structure.

I'd be very interested to hear opinions about this.

Answer 1

My guess is that, unless you've seen such a thing on other StackExchange sites:

• Such a change would require a change to the StackExchange software
• You might persuade them to implement if it would benefit many StackExchange sites (not only Code Review)
• You probably won't be able to persuade them to implement it (they seem to implement new UI features rarely)

Moderators and the community of each site (e.g. of Code Review) are able to define and edit certain site-specific content, for example: customized close reasons: the on/off-topic portion of the FAQ page; but can't alter the software which creates the pages.

However you can probably define the content you suggest, as a meta-topic: as an answer to this meta-question, or as an answer to a new question such as "What makes a good Code Review answer?" or "What topics can you address in a Code Review?" or "Do you have a checklist which you use to review code?" or "What's a good format for an answer on Code Review?"