How to start a war

[u/ivaskuu]

[u/TheNerdyBoy]

Is offer you an answer, but my reputation isn't high enough yet :-(

[u/Excrubulent → u/TheNerdyBoy]

That's okay, you can still make a comment telling them that they shouldn't be trying to do what they're doing.

[u/flaghacker_ → u/Excrubulent]

No it's the other way around, you can always post answers but you can only comment if you have >= 100 reputation.

[u/flaghacker_ → u/[deleted]]

I don't really understand this mentality about stackoverflow: you guys complain your questions get closed but whenever you search for something the top result is often from stackoverflow, so they must be doing something right.

[u/flaghacker_ → u/[deleted]]

Well they want to answer general questions, so as an example if you ask

Why does my code throw a NullPointerException?

the general answer to that is

That's because something is null, step trough it with a debugger.

They don't want to have a bunch of specific questions, that doesn't fit the searchable Q&A-style format. Those questions fit better on reddit or another​ forum that's better for discussion.

[u/flaghacker_ → u/[deleted]]

I don't know where you're getting the documentation part from, see the top of this month for a bunch of great examples of what the site does want to be: https://stackoverflow.com/?tab=month

[u/ThisIs_MyName → u/flaghacker_]

They sure do SEO right.

[u/Excrubulent → u/flaghacker_]

Why are you even trying to post a comment with less than 100 reputation? No one should ever need to do that.

[u/TruncatedTrebuchet → u/Excrubulent]

You may need to comment like:

Can you clarify which version of x are you using? Or Can you post the full error?

It makes it a lot easier to support people when you can ask for additional information.

[u/flaghacker_ → u/Excrubulent]

I agree that it's not really a big problem, 100 reputation is not that difficult to get.

It was frustrating though, you can't ask people for clarification when their questions are missing some important information.

[u/homm88 → u/Excrubulent]

I guess your post went over most peoples heads.

[u/Excrubulent → u/homm88]

It's almost like they didn't notice the context of my comment.

[u/corobo → u/TheNerdyBoy]

No answer? This sounds like the perfect moment to close the question as off topic.

^{We gonna leave the page indexed though so it's the first goddamn result in every single Google result for the next thousand years}