12
$\begingroup$

I applaud the decision of the SE designers to "gameify" their sites by introducing features like reputation and badges. For me that's a nice side-effect, but a brief perusal of my profile makes it clear that that's not the primary reason I participate on MSE, and there's the rub.

All too often, I find it mildly irritating that I can spend a fair amount of time and effort crafting a lapidary response to a question from a reputation-9 member only to get a comment like (exaggerating slightly here) "that was brilliant--you're my new math god" and no upvote or acceptance. In situations like this I'm reluctant to add a comment of my own about upvoting, since it seems too self-serving.

It seems to me that it wouldn't be too hard add a bit of code that would cause a popup to appear once only to first posts, indicating in a sentence or two the Stack Exchange etiquette of upvoting/accepting.

I understand that this might be appropriate in a wider forum, but I thought I'd first test the waters here.

$\endgroup$
2

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
7
$\begingroup$

A reputation-9 user can not upvote your answer anyway: voting up requires 15 rep points. For this reason, I'm not sure it would be a good idea for software to tell a first-time poster to vote when they are not allowed to. (Aside: if we could introduce pop-ups at the time of posting, I'd rather have a pop-up with some guidance on question writing.)

As for acceptances, I think it's entirely appropriate to leave an informative comment for a new user:

If you received an answer that solved your problem, you can mark it as accepted. See Why should we accept answers? for details.

Or something of the sort. I did not find a template for this in List of comment templates.

$\endgroup$
4
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ That is what I do - usually new users need to be told this. $\endgroup$
    – Ron Gordon
    Commented Jun 11, 2013 at 3:02
  • 5
    $\begingroup$ If the user is unregistered, they won't be able to upvote even if they have 15 rep. They can still accept answers, tho. $\endgroup$
    – J. M. ain't a mathematician
    Commented Jun 11, 2013 at 3:04
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ I might as well add my opinion while I'm at it: if you haven't upvoted OP's question (i.e., you haven't contributed to the gain of rep that the OP will need to get upvote privileges), then you've no business to demand that the OP upvote your answer. $\endgroup$
    – J. M. ain't a mathematician
    Commented Jun 11, 2013 at 18:21
  • $\begingroup$ @J.M. your comment I +1'd is why I related my thread to this OP (link in the comment section of this OP). So much emphasis is given to getting a person to accept an answer, my thread focuses on why this is a broader issue for the site and offers a potential solution. $\endgroup$
    – user304051
    Commented Dec 4, 2016 at 0:53

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .