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On the following question I posted, I received several responses and decided to write a small review of these answers regarding to my specifications.

After that I discussed the use of each solution regarding to my requirement (compatibility with a Tikz foreach in this case).

I made all of these review and discussion into my question post, by editing it.

This permits to improve the answers because all of them where tested and compared.

I wounder if it was a good idea to do that or not (the main inconvenient is the size of the question, which maybe become unclear).

In other word, should I do it again for future questions when I receive several answers?

2 Answers 2

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This kind of discussion does not really belong in the question. You have turned the post into a forum-style 'story' of what you did, how you have used the answers, what you think about all of them, including EDIT (date) headers. That goes against the model of Stack Exchange, which is strict Q&A: a well-defined, clear question, with one or more answers where each answer describes a particular approach to the question. Any information that is not necessary to answer the question should not be in the question.

In this case that means that everything except the first paragraph and 'Edit 1' should be deleted. Regarding Edit 1 itself, the phrase "EDIT 1 (Mar 21):" should be deleted, as well as the sentence "At first, I didn't explain why I want the solution generates a comma-separated list of characters (e.g. \myCSlist) which can be used as argument of a \foreach."

The reason for the strict Q&A format is that it allows future visitors that have a similar problem or requirement to quickly see if this question and the answers apply for their situation as well, without distractions. It also allows to close other questions as a duplicate of this question or vice versa if the problem is the same. Both of these reasons fall under the general goal of Stack Exchange to build a high quality comprehensive library of questions, where people can easily find what they are looking for. Forum-style 'story' posts run against this goal and are therefore discouraged.

If you want to discuss particular answers or ask clarification then you can use the comments under each answer to do so. You could also consider to add your own answer for a comparison between all the existing answers, although that would strictly speaking not be an answer to your own question and therefore such an answer would also be against the Q&A format. Usually here on TeX.SE we are not so strict about this kind of answers though, as long as the question itself and the other answers remain free of distractions. However, do try to avoid asking for specific clarifications about other answers in a new answer, or posting additional information that belongs in the question as an additional answer (such as your Edit 1 here, which belongs in the question).

You could also consider to write a blog post about this somewhere on a blog platform. This would keep the Q&A here cleaner, while you would still be able to share your thoughts and experiences. All code and text in answers (and questions) on Stack Exchange is licensed CC BY-SA, which means you can copy it elsewhere as long as you provide attribution. You could link such a blog post in a comment to your question (not in the question itself, because it is not necessary information for answering!) to invite answerers and future visitors to read the blog.

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    Thank you very much for this useful answer (I did well to ask the question apparently ;). What about making the answers review and a bit of discussion (not opinion based) in a Community wiki answer instead of my own answer? Would that be more in the spirit of the site?
    – zetyty
    Commented Sep 15, 2022 at 7:46
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    @SylvainRigal: Not really, since it won't answer the question.
    – Werner Mod
    Commented Sep 15, 2022 at 18:03
  • @Werner: As simple as that (I finally get it maybe ;) Thanks and sorry for the disturbance. However, I really found that doing this review really improved the answers because I rigorously tested them and reported any bugs or additional features that I thought were relevant to address. Wouldn't it be relevant to create a special post for this, neither an answer nor a question: an "answer review" that appears in a special way on the page and easy to edit. Do you think it might be worth me posting a feature request for this if I think about it a bit and give more details?
    – zetyty
    Commented Sep 18, 2022 at 15:43
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    @SylvainRigal if rigourous testing and finetuning of answers is needed to improve them and the comments under an answer are not adequate for that, then the question was probably not clear/focused on the right problem to begin with, or it was too broad and asking too many features for a single question. The solution is to ask more limited and concise questions with clear requirements. If your full problem is not yet solved after the first question then you can always ask a follow-up question to change a requirement or to add additional features.
    – Marijn
    Commented Sep 18, 2022 at 16:32
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The post as it appears now does not fit the site format at all, and is very hard to read with all the Edit headings which make no sense unless you previously had read all the previous versions so have the timeline in your head. The question should make sense as a question without implicitly referencing previous versions of the question and without referencing the answers.

You should revert the question to the form it was in at the point answers were posted. It is generally inadvisable to make major changes to a question after answers are posted as it makes it very unclear what question the answers are answering.

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  • Done, I removed the undesired parts on the linked question on stack.exchange ! Since the linked question has been changed, this question on meta could be difficult to understand for future readers... So, should I edit the present question in order to insert the entire contain of the linked question? This directly contradicts what you just wrote about editing after getting answers but that's a special case ;)
    – zetyty
    Commented Sep 18, 2022 at 15:49
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    @SylvainRigal I guess on average Meta users are more likely to know about ways to access post histories, so this should not be too much of an issue. If you are worried about confusing readers of your question, you can link to specific revisions of your question, though: tex.stackexchange.com/revisions/637833/17.
    – moewe
    Commented Sep 18, 2022 at 19:55

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