For identification requests, are we allowed to give an answer in the comments?
I'm just confused since while the site bans these questions, I sometimes see comments giving out the answers anyway. While I have nothing against people doing so, if they believe it as an act of goodwill or something since we also do not want to intimidate new users, I just think it defeats the purpose of banning these questions in the first place.
Why? If, for example, it was me, a new user with an unregistered account, posting an off-topic question and I see people closing it but commenting the answers, what's to stop me from asking another off-topic question via another unregistered account, knowing I'll get answers anyway? I don't know about others but it's quite a pain seeing and having to close them all the time.
If you'll allow a suggestion, I'd like to suggest that comments on some off-topic questions
- Explaining the site's policy
- Giving links to meta posts on how to do reverse image search, etc. and other helpful tips to find anime/manga
be the only thing that we give while comments
- Where direct answers are given
not be allowed. This, I think, would deter the same people from asking these type of questions in the future. Besides id requests can be asked in chat anyway.
Some might argue that this might be useless since 20 rep is needed to use chat. I think this is just fine to avoid users that just 'hit-and-run'. I don't think we're doing these users who ask id requests any good if we keep 'feeding' them answers without teaching them how to find 'food' on their own. As they say, 'Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.'
Note: This is just a suggestion.