Best action for reviewing a code-only answer

Question

A bit of a situation for a review of this answer where I didn't know what the best action was. The answer has good intentions but could be improved by elaborating what the changes mean and why they are an improvement of the code. This way the OP can understand why this is an improvement.

Thus, I commented this on the answer but afterwards I wanted to click the I'm done button and realised that it doesn't exist there. The other options are not actualy an option:

• Looks OK: no, because elaboration is needed
• Edit: no, because I don't know the intention/knowledge of the author
• Recommend deletion: no, a bit harsh for an answer that could be a good one
• Skip: no, I took action and thus did not skip it

I now chose Skip as I'm not going to wait for answer that clears this, but what would be the best action in such a situation?

Edit: Seems that someone (a mod?) removed my comment. (Yes, I (rolfl) did). The removed comments are:

Hi, try to elaborate on the way you improved the code. Don't post answers with only a series of changes. This might not help the OP understand why this is better code. – Abbas 3 hours ago

Thanks for the comment. Since most of it is covered in the previous answer, I just simplified the funciton. Have added some comments .Hope it helps. Will provide more if required. – thepace 2 hours ago

Answer 1

You did 'the right thing'. The options you list have been considered by me too.

The end result of such an answer, I hope would be the following:

• Downvote (it's not a good answer)
• Comment (polite - saying it needs more information)

Then, one of two things should happen:

1. User improves the answer
2. Answer languishes, and maybe gets deleted.

Review Process

Because the system is not perfect, though, you cannot vote on the answer from the review queue. It would be good if you add the comment, click on the link and 'open-in-new-tab', press 'looks good' on the review, and then downvote the answer. This will clear it from the queue. The Looks Good is to say 'it is an answer, but a bad one'. Think of 'Looks Good' as being 'Does not look like spam or abuse'.

Follow up

Follow up is not expected to happen, really, in situations like this. If the user deletes their answer, you get your reputation (and vote) back again. If they fix it, they get the question 'bumped' in the active page. If they do nothing, they suffer the reputation loss.

In an ideal system, you would maybe get a notification when answers you down-vote get edited.

As a result, you should not feel guilty about the down-vote, and, the poster should have posted a better answer to start with, and will have to fix it to be much better than it started off as, to make up for the poor answer it started off as.