I don't think NAA would be appropriate. It clearly tries to answer the question. It's just not useful as it misses the main point of the question. This is a clear case for a downvote, not an NAA flag. NAA flags are for people that misunderstood what "Answer" meant in the context of SE compared to a regular message board.

@nvoigt From the answer there: "The "not an answer" flag is for posts that are either completely unrelated to the question, a "me too" kind of post, a follow-up question asked in an answer, etc."" A 5e answer on a 4e post fits that description.

I don't see it that way. A 5e answer to a 4e question is not useful, but it is an answer. We can downvote it and when it reaches -3 we can delete it. But NAA is a flag for formally wrong posts and we are talking about the content of the post, not the form.

There is a nice explanation here why NAA is not intended for incorrect answers. The point is that I do see it as "aggressively policing" to handle this through flags and mod powers, instead of having the community vote it down as normal for wrong answers. A 5e answer to a 4e question would be a perfect textbook case for downvoting. No moderator intervention necessary on any level.

Well, that's a completely different story I was explicitly asked to not bring up here... I'm just saying that's the way it should be working.

I'd like to thank you for explaining that term, because that intent wasn't clear when it first arrived in the discussion. At the moment, your message is that the rest of us who can aren't frequently enough commenting/down-voting the non RAW responses to RAW tags. Did I grok your comments on that correctly? What that tells me is that the tag isn't the problem, but the combination of user patterns and community monitoring are the joint issue to address. (And of course the data collection will hopefully assist with that).

@KorvinStarmast It has to go beyond simply downvoting those. They aren't answers, they have to get deleted one way or another. Flags make that pretty easy and is the primary way we find answers like that right now. Normal users can do it too, but it's pretty tough (3 20k users have to vote to delete). It's not exactly the tag that's the problem. But when tags attract a lot of problematic posting, they tend to be the target for cleanup because they contain questions with a lot of similarities (you can go back and look at the 5e discussions when it first came out to see more examples).

This is one of the points where the mods' opinions differ, for those who are keeping track. I am not eager to aggressively police answers, after seeing it be ineffective for game-rec answers. I think that lots of poor answers to RAW questions is the fault of hiding vital question information inside a tag, which is a job that tags aren't meant to do, so removing that job from the tag is the solution. I think RAW questions should be overtly about RAW in the body, so that "did you read the question?" is the problem, not "didn't you see the tag?". Let the tag just categorise existing information.

@waxeagle Thanks, clearer, and a better understanding of where the community mods (with sufficient rep) can be of help.

@SevenSidedDie That argues for at least the improved tag description/help page improvement that was suggested during the initial discussions a few weeks ago.

I'll also mention that one of the other sites I moderate does use tags in a similar manner to the current use of RAW and it requires tight moderation of answers otherwise you end up with unusable chaos.

@KorvinStarmast Yes, it does. It's not something that I've been rushing to bring up without more thought and observation, given how radioactive the tag has become of late. I've been quietly looking at how the tag is used over the past several weeks, and asking questions where its usage has been ambiguous. It's been interesting so far.

@waxeagle I have some reason to believe that questions about RAW don't need that kind of handling though. I think we (the community) slowly slid into using the tag that way for bad reasons and in a “frog in boiling water” way, due to fears/concerns on either side of some playstyle divisions in the community, rather than because it is necessary or even useful.

@SevenSidedDie Agreed, if we abandon that method of using the tag, those measures would be unnecessary.

@waxeagle And if we kept the tag's meaning as being a filter on answers, I agree the policing would be necessary to have any chance to make it work under that meaning.

@waxeagle "if that actually worked, I'd be OK with that. But it really doesn't in practice." That statement is patently false. The policy is clearly working on SO, which gets much more traffic than RPG. You should consider examining why YOU do not think it applies here and/or to you.

@waxeagle I am sorry that the OTHER site you work with allows you to ignore the intent of things. At least some users of this community are asking you to stop doing that.

@JoshuaDrake comparing to SO is a ridiculous comp on just about any level. Let's think about this. How many 20k users does SO have? (answer over 100 pages of users). How many do we have? (answer: about half a page). While there are several orders of magnitude more questions and answers on SO, there are well over two orders of magnitude more users with those privileges.

@JoshuaDrake I only mention the other site I moderate as an example of how tagging in this manner plays out. I fully understand that different sites have different norms. I've been here longer than I've been on any other site on the network (except SO).

@SevenSidedDie I strongly disagree with policing as a general policy and from what I've seen of the RAW discussion this is a poor candidate.

@waxeagle Also, please register/note/count a user who STRONGLY disagrees with you regarding edition wars being a reason for NAA.

@JoshuaDrake There's nothing in the answer about edition warring. Do you mean the part where an answer giving 4e mechanics is NAA for a question about 5e mechanics etc.? Is that bit about edition warring where the intensity in your comments is coming from? (I can't figure out why the intensity is there, so I'm only guessing it might be related to that bit of misunderstanding, or perhaps partially related.)

@JoshuaDrake That aside, I agree that aggressive policing of answers is a dreadful job and I personally believe that in this case it's not effective enough to be worth considering.

@SevenSidedDie the fact that a moderator is using NAA because an answer used the wrong edition is clearly a violation of the intent of the flag given the references linked by nvoigt. And I, for one, can clearly see where it can push into that territory.

@JoshuaDrake if someone posts Java code on a c++ answer, what happens? downvote, comment, NAA flag, gets deleted by users or mod. I feel like this is pretty simple stuff.

@JoshuaDrake If the answer appears to be honestly trying to answer the question asked and is mindfully pulling in stuff from other editions to answer it, that's fine. (It's rare that voters approve, but it does happen.) When it's NAA is when they misread the question and, due to their misunderstanding, the post is attempting to answer a question that isn't being asked. i.e., "How do I frob a sword in 5e?" "Well there are no frobbing rules, but I've used the 3e frobbing rules and they work for this" is fine, but "The rules are on p. 997 of Heroes of Shadow, duh!" isn't answering this Q.

@JoshuaDrake I'm going to chime in & side with wax eagle & SSD on the edition stuff. If someone asks, "How can I do X in 5e?" then "In 3.5 you did it using Y," is a glorified comment, not an answer, because it doesn't answer the question that was asked.

@ObliviousSage 2 against, 4 in favor of a specific use of NAA. Though I wonder how you reconcile that to the referenced posts? I've personally found that knowing how something was handled in a different edition often sheds light on a rules question. More importantly why is the NAA something for the mods to police and not the community? Why should the mods decide that an answer does not provide value? Why even have up down votes, or for that matter an accept feature, simply let the mods choose the one true answer.

@JoshuaDrake we're not going to make a policy decision hidden away in the comments on meta. You clearly feel very strongly about this. It may perhaps merit its own meta where the whole community can comment instead of a few folks who are participating in this thread. This is about the third time today I've suggested you write a whole post. If you just want to go on in comments, nothing productive is going to come of this.

@SevenSidedDie agree to disagree on using the 3.5 rules to fill a gap in 5. Though I continue to argue that the COMMUNITY and not the moderators should decide that the 3.5 rules do not provide value as an answer to the question. I hope to have enough time this evening to write an "answer" to this post. As was mentioned these one offs are not super effective.

@waxeagle I too, as I understand you do, have a day job. I've seen responses in my inbox and popped in to respond as I've had time. My plan to author one at lunch were derailed. I realized last night that I needed to write up an answer, though at this point it will probably be drowned in the noise, I'll do my darnedest.

@JoshuaDrake No no, we agree there: often an answer can do that just fine. The only reason we would delete such an answer is if it wasn't filling a gap in another edition with different-edition rules: if it was plainly obvious that they thought the question was about a different game than it actually was. If an answer obviously knows what the question is about, and chooses to answer with rules borrowed from elsewhere, that's totally cool. We just have a job to clean up answers that are accidentally off-topic because the answerer failed to read the question.

@SevenSidedDie I would especially go that route if it was a RAW question. "I'm playing 5e how do I do X," answer "There's no rules in 5e but here's some from 3.5" - totally fair. "I didn't read your question so am answering with 3.5" - not good, possibly worth deleting (they can always revamp it and get it undeleted, deletes like closes aren't permanent). RAW 5e question and "here's some 3.5", definitely NAA.

@mxyzplk Basically that kind of sliding scale, yeah.

I know everyone wants a black and white "this is OK and this isn't" on these things, but there's always a lot of context that really determines the right thing to do.