Part of the nature of our site seems to be that we receive a lot of first posts from users that are posted as answers, but are really either comments or follow-up questions.
The reason this happens is partially because you need to earn 50 reputation to comment on someone else's post, so new users who are unfamiliar with the platform see a "conversation" that they want to participate in, and posting an answer is the only option available to them.
The ones that are clearly intended as comments are easy: moderators have a tool to automatically delete an answer, and then convert it to a comment.
Users who are asking detailed questions in their "answer", however, pose additional challenges.
We have a standard comment that we leave for these users, advising them that their answer needs to be fixed.
Should we continue using this standard comment? At what point do we delete the non-answers that can't easily be converted to a comment? How do we balance policing the quality of content on our site with being welcoming and accomodating to new users who may not be familiar with our peculiar format?
it is not an answer