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We get a lot of perfectly reasonable questions asked as answers to questions.

I'll often reply and tell the person how to ask the question the proper way on this site, but it's rare that they ever do. More than likely, it just gets deleted by a moderator.

It'd be possible for someone else to ask the question on their behalf, but I'd really like to see a way for moderators to be able to directly promote an exiting answer (maybe even comments) into a full-blown question ... maybe add a link back to the original page that they posted it on, in case it was a follow-up.

So what would it take to get that functionality added?

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  • Related: meta.cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/1799/…
    – Shog9
    Nov 26, 2014 at 22:22
  • 2
    @Shog9 I added another dozen examples there. I'm with Joe: it feels like we're just taking questions and throwing them in the garbage. It feels like the way the site works now, the only choice is for a moderator to turn "post auto-comment, delete non-answer" (10 seconds) into "copy answer into question, edit/title/tag (because it's in my name now, I don't want it sloppy), auto-comment, delete" (a few minutes) and along the way, ensure that if the user was going to do the right thing and repost and get rep, now they can't.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Nov 26, 2014 at 23:58
  • 1
    For reference, we get ~7 questions a day currently, and as a lower bound (I don't handle all the flags and sometimes I forget to bookmark questions-as-answers that I handle), we get 1-2 of these per week, so we're talking about losing maybe 1 in 30 of our potential questions, maybe more. Subjectively, it also feels like a substantial fraction of the flags I handle, but I haven't tracked that.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Nov 27, 2014 at 0:06
  • Also, sorry, I know we just delete them, they can theoretically still see the deleted question but a lot of these people haven't quite figured out the whole signing up and logging in thing yet, so I'm not sure how many of them ultimately do :-/ and it's kind of a pain to try to leave them there for a day and then delete.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Nov 27, 2014 at 0:10
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    I still don't think that this particular variety of hand-holding would have a positive impact on the site. Not only are we teaching them that it's OK to be lazy (by contrast, converting to a comment is a downgrade of their answer), but almost all of these answers would require significant editing (correcting errors, taking out irrelevant references, adding context, etc.) to be a useful question - basically the same amount of effort as just creating a new question. It's not like we ever see comprehensive, well-written, deeply insightful questions accidentally posted as answers.
    – Aaronut
    Nov 28, 2014 at 18:58

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