Nothing wrong. Answers and comments which don't meet the rules are usually removed and, especially for popular questions, they can pile up to a significant number. Unfortunately they still appear in the comments count.

If you check the automod reply, it provides you with a link to an extension (courtesy of /u/almost_useless) which does help easing this inconvenience. As well as to other regular features where you can find a selection of answered questions.

Also, keep in mind that a good answer usually takes some time - both for those who have to wait, and for those who post it.

What I have ended up doing is looking at just this sub on its own, rather than as part of my general feed of subreddits I'm on, and sorting by 'Top'. That way you find lots of questions with proper answers.

And very interesting they are too. Makes a change from most of Reddit.

Edit: punctuation.

A few other tricks besides the browser extension:

• Browse the subreddit by Best from the last 7 days. This gives a much better ratio of answered posts: most heavily upvoted posts do get good answers, but it often takes a day or three.

• Upvote questions you find interesting, then check back a day or two later via the "upvoted" tag on your user profile.

• The mods put together a weekly "Sunday Digest" of "Interesting & Overlooked Posts" from the past week that received good answers but little attention.

• There's a bot-curated subreddit, r/historiansanswered, which cross-posts things from this sub that have gotten answers of at least 250 words that have stood for at least 12 hours without being moderated away.

Totally, I was wondering the same! Often I see a question to which I would like to see answers to, however, when I look, I can only see the singe auto-generated comment; despite being able to see there has been more than one comment in the count.

To be honest that happens on the vast majority of the questions I see to the point that I was thinking of not following the page anymore as it is so annoying. I'll try the link that someone mentioned in the bot reply. Hopefully I'm just being an idiot expecting to see answers on the thread rather than in in a link from it.

Cheers for asking! 👍

I was considering posting a meta question on the same lines, but I was hesitant since I'm relatively new to the subreddit and didn't want to break any rules. Now that we're here, and having read some very useful advice, I would like to propose a suggestion/ask on its viability:

Would it be possible to use tags, as other subreddits do (and as is done here with the meta posts), to label which questions have received at least one comprehensive answer? That way users could filter out all posts without an answer, and sort them by whatever parameters they choose without being limited to sorting by top posts. Also would work for mobile. I understand there may be reasons why this is not done, considering the high competence displayed by the mods, but I would be interested in knowing the reasons if that's the case.

On the plus side, this is the most comments I have ever been able to read on an r/askhistorians questions before!

This category is the one I love to read the most and yet the one that frustrates me the most due to the standards set.

However when there is something that is allowed, it's usually "wow, I had no idea".