Doing reviews in low quality queue I often stumble upon weak attempts at answers that nevertheless look like salvageable.
As a rule, these are brief opinions / recommendations that could possibly become of reasonable quality if (note: if) their authors explain why they recommend it as answering the question asked.
Per my reading of Guidelines for reviewing Low Quality Posts, above leaves me two options: either Looks Good or Recommend Deletion. How do I choose between these?
- For the sake of completeness, two other options mentioned in guidelines are Edit and Skip. Edit hardly applies, as this would essentially require reading author's mind, not something I am proficient with. Skip doesn't feel right either because I only love that button when I am unsure, which is not the case when I am strongly confident about my evaluation of the post content (using Skip in cases like this would simply defer decision someone else who will face same dilemma as I, not quite fair).
An example of the post like I talk about is in this review:
I assume some other languages now have the option of multiple return values.
Interested 10Kers at respective sites can look in LQ queue history at Programmers or at Stack Overflow for more examples.
Note a while back, I felt rather strongly in favor of Recommend Deletion. This preference was based on my understanding of the ideas and features introduced to allow seeing own deleted answers and questions.
I thought, now that author can easily get to their deleted post to improve and flag for undeletion, it looks only natural to vote for removing it while it's not yet OK (heck this could even save them from a couple downvotes while their low quality content is visible and annoys readers).
But closer encounter with the way how deletion works made me wonder if above reasoning is right. When I deleted one of my own old answers, I realized that only recent posts are easy to find out.
When deleted post is more than 60 days old, it is quite difficult for author to discover and improve and this basically invalidates what made me believe that Recommend Deletion is so much better.
Update per discussion in comments: current design is such that notification along with the link to deleted post reaches the user, except when all reviewers select "No comment" in deletion dialog.