What about adding multiple answers to a same question?

Question

I recently noticed this post and found that there are many (4) answers from same guy.

IMHO he could have add all the answers in a single post. What do you think? Is this the right way?

PS: the answer with most up votes is a community-wiki.

Answer 1

From the top voted answer on What is the official etiquette on answering a question twice? linked by @5chdn,

When you have two distinct answers.

It's better to post two different answers than to put them both into one answer.

Some questions will be multiple-answer types directly, like tips-and-tricks or best-practices. This allows the ones the community feels are the best/correct to float to the top.

Some computer languages have a lot of flexibility in how to solve any one problem, so by listing them both as separate answers (if very distinct) they can both be voted on by the community, and this will allow the better answer to float to the top. It also allows the comment threads to be more focused on each answer.

If you put two very different answers in one, then one could be a great answer, and one could be a terrible way to do things, but the upvotes (or downvotes) on the good (or bad) answer will drag the other along with it to the top (or bottom).

From the post referred to in this question - Common useful JavaScript snippets for geth - the answers are:

• Answer 1 by @Nikhil M
  1. Mine only when there are transactions!
  2. Get some data from get without starting node.
  3. View a Transaction
  4. Print a Block Details
  5. Check all Balances
• Answer 2 by @BokkyPooBah - Script To Find Mined Blocks And Uncles + List Transactions
• Answer 3 by @BokkyPooBah - Script To Find Transactions To/From An Account
• Answer 4 by @BokkyPooBah - Script To Find Non-Zero Transaction Count In A Range Of Blocks
• Answer 5 by @BokkyPooBah - Script To Get Account Balances And Including TheDAO Tokens

In my opinion, the scripts in Answers 2 to 5 provide different functionality, and it would be messy to include them all in one answer. This is different to the my answer in Where can I find some Solidity / Smart Contract source code examples? where the short links can be combined into one answer.

I'm happy to do whatever ESE advises regarding the posting of separate answers:

1. separate answers;
2. combine answers;
3. change all the separate answers into community wikis; or
4. stop posting new snippets to old questions.

Answer 2

Giving multiple answers gives opportunity to vote on them separately and it's recommended way in case the answers are different. So as long the answers are distinct and self-contained, it's fine to do it.

For example when you've huge answer which mixes different methods and one of the proposed solution stops working or becomes outdated, as the result the whole post may got down-voted, so the other working solution will suffer. It's also easier to find the right, most voted answer.

See also:

• What is the official etiquette on answering a question twice?