<moderator-hat>
The first thing that comes to mind is "this user is trying to somehow abuse the system to farm upvotes, badges, and reputation score."
Because yes, people do that. All the time. And when you look like you're abusing the system, chances are people will think you are abusing the system.
And abusing the system leads to all kinds of not-fun things nobody wants to go through.
</moderator-hat>
About long answers...
Long, detailed answers are normal on this site. While the rest of the Stack Exchange network limits post length to ~30K characters, on Code Review the post length limit is doubled, to ~60K characters. There's a reason for this, and it's because long answers are here to stay.
So... where's the line?
There isn't One True Way to write up a peer review, and we don't want one either. But I believe we all agree that posting 3, 4, 5, 6 or more answers on a single question is abusive.
The line, to me, is here:
^ that's the line. It's 3 characters in markdown: --- and you have a line. And that line can - and should be used to split relatively unrelated aspects of an answer.
The point is that, a properly formatted post can be very long, and still be an amazing read. Use markdown formatting help if you're not sure how to format your answers.
But are multiple, short answers ok?
It was suggested in the past that separate answers are absolutely fine if they're mutually exclusive. I like that suggestion very much, but I don't think that's the be-all-end-all solution.
We don't want reviewers to think they have to write long answers to post an answer on CR - obviously, short answers are perfectly fine: they stand on their own and if that's all a reviewer says on a question, it's fine too.
But if you're reviewing code and find that you have multiple points, it doesn't mean you have multiple answers.
- An
- Answer
- Can
- Very
- Well
- Make
- Multiple
- Points
See?
Debunking
(in response to this answer)
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the majority of people refuse reading long, not very good structured texts.
Correct. That's why when you post a long answer, you format it properly and structure it appropriately. Or when you come across a poorly structured/formatted long answer, you can always edit it to improve it. The solution is proper formatting, not multiple answers.
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There may be a problem quickly scan a long one for yet not known things for me whereas in answers addressing only one issue is easier distinguish if I will skip it or read it carefully.
Again, proper formatting. With proper headings, I can skip all the nitpicking stuff and quickly jump to the meat of a well-structured answer.
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There are cases when the code in the question is so poor that the only acceptable solution is to completely rewrite it.
I often do this: top part of my answer reviews OP's code as written, and the bottom part explains a complete rewrite, using a completely different approach.
If the actual peer review is long enough, it can very well stand on its own - and then the alternate solution could very well stand on its own as well, with proper explanations of why and how that alternate solution is better than the OP's. This is a good, valid reason to split up an answer!
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every answer has a "share" link - and I prefer to share the explanation of only one particular thing of my interest, not lost in huge bunch of other information.
That isn't a justification for flooding a post with multiple, short answers: it's a work-around that [poorly] mitigates the lack of hash-links for H1/H2/H3 headings in Stack Exchange posts - and that is entirely an implementation detail of how Markdown is getting rendered on the site, and is entirely subject to change in the future.
Nothing forbids making a well-backed-up feature-request on CR Meta, or even Meta Stack Exchange, to ask that the Markdown renderer starts turning <h1> into <div id="section-title"><h1> so that hash-links can work.
Posting multiple answers to circumvent that lacking feature, is not a good solution.
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The reason for a nice formatting answer is to make it attractive and readable
Bingo. And it's also the weapon of choice to turn long, boring, wall-of-text answers into pure awesomeness.
