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Take a look at this page of the Help Center - What should I do when someone answers my question?

If you only read the text with special markup, as someone would when skimming the page, it reads like so:

What should I do when someone answers my question?

vote
accepting the answer
mark an answer as accepted

What should I not do?

Do not change the code in the question
Do not add an improved version of the code

  1. Simply accepting an answer
  2. Posting a new question
  3. Posting a self-answer
  4. Sharing your code on an external site

I left out the part where there's more bolded text in the 3rd and 4th items of the list, but basically, by taking a glance at the page, it reads like you shouldn't do the things that we actually want people to do!

I don't have a good solution for this, which is why I have put this up as a question rather than an answer to other help center cleaning questions like

  1. Let's draft better Help Center pages!
  2. Help spot deficiencies in our Help Center
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  • \$\begingroup\$ I completely agree \$\endgroup\$
    – janos
    Mar 10, 2016 at 17:00
  • \$\begingroup\$ Perhaps it's all about resizing the headers? Make the "what you should do" a lot bigger than "what you should not do". \$\endgroup\$ Mar 10, 2016 at 18:14

2 Answers 2

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I propose to add a new section:

I improved my code based on the reviews. What next?

First of all, consider accepting one of the answers. The one that helped you the most, or the one you consider the best, the most worthy to stand at the top as recommendation for future readers.

If you'd like to share the revised version of your code, the following are acceptable (and by no means mandatory) options:

Followed by the original bullet points 2, 3, 4.

The details of the text I wrote above can be probably better. My main point is to:

  1. Make it a separate section
  2. Encourage accepting other answers
  3. Finally, clearly separated from the others, provide the optional alternatives for sharing code
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My simple solution would be to add a third header after the "Do not add an improved version of the code", like so:

Instead...

and then show the list.

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    \$\begingroup\$ FWIW I fully support this. \$\endgroup\$ Mar 10, 2016 at 16:05
  • \$\begingroup\$ Or Updated code: or Changed it based on [user]'s recommendations to look like this: or anything remotely like that. If we can make it more explicit that's not how this site works it would be for the better. \$\endgroup\$
    – Mast Mod
    Mar 12, 2016 at 22:39

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