# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged comment

70

The comment you sketch is fine. This is not what is meant. What is meant is that one should not post "Thanks!!!!!!!!!!", "This is so interesting.", "Best answer ever!" on every other good post one comes across. Imagine a post with score 14 where every user that up-voted the post also commented "Thanks; nice answer." It would be a bit messy. Note that ...

58

You should flag for moderator attention and explain what's up. Mods can check the history and see even those things which have been deleted. You should absolutely not engage with that user in any other way. Let moderators handle exceptional incidents like this. Just flag, walk away, and continue to Be Nice on your own.

55

A joke here and there is alright; if somebody minds they can flag as "too chatty" or "not constructive". One should not overdo this though. It is also important to keep in mind that humor and irony often do not go over well in written and over language and possibly cultural difference. Moreover, when you notices somebody does not like your remarks leave ...

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36

I think your answer is fine - setting up the subtraction could certainly be sufficient to help someone with this problem, especially since it should be fairly clear to them where those numbers are coming from. It's clearly a serious answer. However, AvZ does raise a valid objection - but I'd read that more as a stylistic thing (best resolved by AvZ writing ...

36

"Rude" is maybe a strong word, but it is certainly discouraged. If you do it once, likely nothing much negative will happen. But as a rule please do not do this. An exception might be if the posts are extremely closely linked, say, if you ask a a direct follow-up question or something like that. But even in that case I would recommend to be ...

33

Let me begin by saying that I'm not disagreeing with quid. Generally, comments with "Thanks!!!!!" are entirely useless. The "guideline" that you cite, is a network-wide guideline, and the MSE culture is a bit different. At least for now. However, if you asked a question, and someone answered it, it is completely reasonable to post a thank you comment. Even ...

29

If the question is tagged homework, I will post hints as answers, since I hate questions showing up in the "unanswered" queue despite being fully resolved in the comments. If I strongly suspect the question is homework, I will post hints as answers to discourage others from spoiling full solutions. Otherwise, if the hint is very short and I expect others ...

29

Unfortunately, I think that some appropriate uses of CW is lost on a lot of users who are reviewing CW posts flagged, inappropriately, as NAA or "this is at most a comment....", and on the flaggers as well, ever since CW has faded out of common use, in the past few years. So a lot of current users don't even know that anyone answering with a CW answer gains ...

28

A new user who posts a pure homework question: Another version of something to say to a new user who posts a pure homework question: Context: I didn't actually know this thread was here, so I typed this up on the fly as something appropriate. Since someone who's been here way longer than I thought it would be useful here and suggested I post it here, I ...

28

Your post leaves many important details open. Some questions follow: How are the answers? Are the answers that are being upvoted any good? If they're not good, then this is an issue indeed. If the answers are good -- could these upvotes be deserved? So: are you sure this is an incident of mutual tactical serial upvoting? Is the symbiotic relationship of ...

27

Some notes in the form of an answer. Moderators cannot invalidate votes. Any votes. Ever. (And those downvotes I received on that answer were certainly not appropriate! Why can't I invalidate them!? Why!?) We're trusted with a lot of information and tools, but SE still likes to keep certain things out of our reach. Invalidation of votes is either done ...

26

The whole point of stack exchange is to build a high quality collection of questions and answers for a given subject. If you think of things in these terms, it is irrelevant how old a question is. If you can improve the corpora with a better answer, add it.

25

It really depends on the situation. Sometimes asking "what have you tried?" is indeed useless. However, a lot of time it does give us some useful information. By showing what the questioner has tried. One get a grip on the questioner's level of mathematical sophistication. One can taylor make an answer which the questioner can understand. Another very ...

25

It's perfectly fine in my opinion (and judging by what I see on MSE, by the majority of people's opinion). In fact, I'm pretty sure this is the intended use of the comments feature: Use comments to ask for clarification or add more information. If asking for clarification on other people's questions wasn't okay, you wouldn't be presented with the option. ...

25

Your Comment contained a link to an older Question. Although this Question was not the final target chosen by voting to close-as-duplicate, someone may have voted to consider that target the duplicate, or the system may have identified that link as a duplicate of the target that was eventually chosen. What is known is that when a vote to close-as-...

25

Also when writing a comment it explicitly states to avoid comments like "thanks" or so. Based on what I've seen, it's more a warning because some popular questions would net hundreds of such comments from others viewing them. I feel like that rule is more lax in terms of the asker saying it to someone else; I know I've done it a few times. I guess the only ...

24

The procedure used by the Crusade of answers, which specializes in trying to reduce the unanswered questions queue, is a synthesis of the aforementioned strategies: Consider if there is a legitimate reason to vote to move/delete/close the question. If not, ask the commenter using the @ feature to convert his/her comment to an answer. If there's no response ...

24

No, it's not. However, you should mark any such answers as Community Wiki, so you don't gain reputation from someone else's work.

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Yes, this is the idea. As long as you have not reached 50 points, you can only do posts (questions and answers). An answer should be an actual answer to the questions; it can be a partial answer too, but it should be substantive. The reason why you cannot tell users what is wrong with their work is that, as unfriendly as this may sound, "we" first want ...

23

There's no written policy (until now, I guess), and each mod has his or her quirks (so the discussion below is guaranteed to apply only if the handling moderator is yours truly). While you asked about "not constructive", let me be more ambitious and answer in the greatest generality. Before saying anything else, let me first say this: Moderation on each ...

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While I do not think that "thank you" comments are necessary, and would even advocate that in prevention of clutter that people do not post thank yous, I would also not be offended by someone posting it on my answers. But if you want to thank me I would much rather you embed the thank you as part of a longer comment asking a follow-up question, or a ...

21

Delete your comment, flag any associated comments for deletion. A toy example: User 1: "I think there is a mistake on the third paragraph. Not every $X$ is a $Y$!" User 2: "Sorry, I don't understand. Isn't every $X$ a $Y$ when we are in a $Z$? User 1: "No, that only holds for specific $Z$'s." User 2: "Ok, thanks!" All such comments ...

21

In the spirit of the question: This started life as more of an extended comment than an answer. I think it has morphed into an answer now though. Math.SE seems to be based around the idea that every problem is soluble by a single person. This is clearly not the case, as, for example, in research mathematics single-authored papers are the exception rather ...

20

As Arthur Fischer said, I declined the flag because the post was already deleted. That is because: The post is already deleted, so the comment can no longer be seen by users with <10K reputation. In such a case, I prefer to keep questionable comments visible to make it easier for making future moderation decisions. Unfortunately there is no "do nothing ...

20

Often I leave a note at the comments: " @who_already_answered : Would you consider posting your comments as an answer?" Usually this works well. I guess people sometimes feel uncomfortable with posting answers that they feel is too trivial. I think it is a matter of building a culture/habit. If people keep asking posters to place answers in the answers, ...

20

The typo-comments you mentioned fall precisely under "no longer relevant." Please do flag them. It is also appropriate to flag comments that had asked for clarification that was later provided. Comment flags are only reviewed by moderators. Don't worry about the volume. This type of flag is pretty easy to handle. If there are several such comments in a ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible