What makes a good answer?

Question

Hello community,

since we are always looking to expand our Help Center with information and tips on TibiaQA, I wanted to ask what, in your mind, makes a good answer? Are there any specific requirements that you have to consider the answer good and worthy of your up-vote? Please share your feedback here. If you have any examples of good answers, you are welcome to attach them here as well.

Answer 1

Giving a good answers is a foundation of TibiaQA. The correct answer can help not only the person asking the question, but also the next users, who in the future will be looking for questions about their problem. Therefore, it is a more responsible part of using the fansite.

Let’s start with three things, that should be absolutely avoided:

Before you write your answer make sure, that your idea is not already presented by another user. Don’t duplicate already existing answers and make sure that you always provide new, previously unknown information to the topic. This is the only way to build TibiaQA database and help others.

… DON’T WRITE IT! Sounds really obvious, but it is the most common mistake. TibiaQA in its contribution system grants every answer, that’s why some users pay more attention to giving an answer instead of ensuring that it is correct. In the best case player, who asked a question has to break through the useless knowledge, but in the worst case he gets misleading answers.

Don’t forget about online behavior rules, called netiquette, which makes communication between different users pleasant. Don’t be rude and offensive. Even if you disagree with someone else’s answer, remember to respect it.

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So what makes a good answer?

What is meant by that?

Make sure, that your answer fully solves the problem presented in the question.  Avoid short, brief answers. Instead of simple “yes” or “no” try to discuss the topic in more details, present an argumentation why you have such an opinion. You can give some examples to better illustrate the problem.

Use information from proper sources, like official, supported and promoted fansites. Rumors or your friend’s words unfortunately are not enough to be sure that the answer is correct. If it’s possible add links to the sources, to give others wider insight to the topic.

Try to care about visual aspect of your answer.

To make the answer clear and eye-friendly you can use some tools to edit the text.

Doesn't it look better when keywords in your answer are in bold? You can also use the italics tool to highlight quotes from the text. The choice of edition tools is much larger, starting with color, font and letter size, ending with tables. It's up to you, what will you choose.

Sometimes too long, continuous text arouses aversion. Tired everyday routine, we skip those answers and focus on what is more achievable for us. To optically deceive this effect - use paragraphs!

If you write about specific place in game or item, try to add a maps, graphics, screenshots, even a video, to make it easier to understand for others.

A good example you can see in the question - “What is your favourite store decoration item?” in Loreffy’s answer:

Would you know what looks the magic effect like, if you are not the owner of Baby Unicorn, without this screenshot? Rather not. That’s why visualization is so important.

Some of question on TibiaQA are tagged as opinion-based. It means, that author asks rather about our opinion than facts.

As everyone knows, there are as many tastes as there are users in TibiaQA community, so be respectful to the others.

To write your opinion-based answer in a clearer way, do not tell the story of your tibian life or anecdotes. It doesn’t help in building database of TibiaQA in any way.