How far should I go when answering?

Question

Someone complained to me recently that my answer was too difficult to implement. I was very conscious when putting together my answer of giving it in general terms as opposed to being super specific. The instructions were step by step, and should not be too difficult to understand, even with only a bit of experience. I could write out the entire script for them (and I've seen this done before) but then how specific should I be about it? Should I write it just for their system? This will make the answer less general, and less useful for people.

Link:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/401526/116911

Answer 1

It's a big question, and so I think it's a little unreasonable to expect a pile of working code in an Answer. The Question would like an iptables-based answer, but does say:

If this can't be done at the iptables level, is there some way to do it?

Based on How do I write a good answer? --

Any answer that gets the asker going in the right direction is helpful

-- I think you've done that.

Could you go further? Sure! Limiting access to websites is a reasonably common goal, and it seems to me that your approach could easily be modified for other people's specific situations, even if you picked some arbitrary hosts to use as examples.

Answer 2

Having seen the link, I'm not sure there is anything here that requires fixing. The answer looks reasonable - it gives a general sketch of an approach to solve a problem. You certainly shouldn't feel compelled to fill in routine details. And I don't see where the poster complained to you. If you mean

Thanks, however, this seems like alot of nontrivial programming that would take a while to implement.

I think that could be described as much a comment as a complaint, and it doesn't seem the poster is expecting you do anything more than you have. She has certainly made no explicit statement to that effect.