This question has been asked so often, I have no idea what our actual policy is:

- https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3587/almost-correct-answers
- https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1451/should-answers-that-break-the-rules-be-deleted
- https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1940/should-we-flag-and-delete-not-an-answer-posts
- https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1447/can-we-stop-flagging-poor-answers-as-not-an-answer
- https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/825/what-should-count-as-not-an-answer-here
- https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5159/what-should-the-policy-be-on-partial-answers

<s>None of them are closed as duplicates.</s> Most of them overlap but not all. Also, all of those opinions are from 2014 (the one answer from 2015 is essentially a repost of one of the others). We still regularly get Not-An-Answer flags on answers that don't meet the spec, so it would be great if there was a single, up-to-date policy to refer to.

To summarise what results those posts yielded:

- Consensus seems to be *mostly* that answers which don't meet the spec are "just" factually wrong answers, and Meta.SE says about those:

 > Answers that are answers but are factually wrong [...] should get downvoted, but not deleted.

  Or just straight from one of the flag decline reasons we have as mods:

 > flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer

  Geobits made a good argument in favour of this view that downvoted bad answers act as signposts for future visitors. However, the one problem I have with this policy is that its main justification is always that "that's the standard SE policy". That policy was created for Q&A sites. PPCG is not a Q&A site, so if we adopt standard policy like that, it would be great if there was some additional support for why this even makes sense here.

- trichoplax [made an argument in favour of deleting such answers](https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1960/8478). And I think it's a fairly good one: downvoted wrong answers acting as signposts only works *as long as they are actually downvoted*. Too often, we have answers that a) accumulate tons of upvotes before anyone notices they are wrong (and then are left in that state by the author and the voters) or b) are deliberately wrong but "funny" or contain nice pictures or whatever and are upvoted for those regardless of the actual code. [(Example for users who can see deleted posts.)](https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/35636/8478) Those are especially problematic with HNQ challenges, which get lots of votes from users who aren't active here ... and those are exactly the challenges where having downvoted answers as signposts would be useful. This is why I'm not convinced that the standard SE policy is actually the best course of action for PPCG.

- Another thing I found in a comment by PhiNotPi is that maybe we should distinguish between answers where the author knows they are wrong and those where he doesn't. I haven't seen this point addressed in any answers at all yet.

- To top it all off [the only recent related discussion](https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7448/8478) has a score of 28 in favour of not posting almost-working solutions at all in the first place.

This is why I'd like to have one more, but comprehensive discussion on this matter to see what the community actually thinks these days, and how you expect us as moderators to deal with these flags if they are raised.