One day, I wanted to up-vote an answer because it was so helpful, but couldn't because I didn't have enough reputation. A little while later, I wanted to answer a question because I was feeling helpful, but couldn't again. Later, I wanted to comment on an answer because I thought there could be a little more clarification with still no success. So, how do I get those first few points that will open the world of stack-fun-times up to me?
1120
As a new user, I find it impossible to contribute to the community or to even begin contributing. I know why the reputation system is in place and I respect it, but at the same time it is too hard on new users.  It started with me wanting to upvote a question...     "Vote Up requires 15 reputation"   Just to appreciate a good question that helped me I need 15 rep? OK..., so I find out how I can get reputation points. More or less, I need to ask a question for +5 and add an answer for +10. I don't have any questions at the moment and I don't want to spam a random question, but I did happen to have a slightly different answer to the earlier question that I wanted to upvote. So I try to answer...     This question is protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site.   Now... I know this doesn't apply to every question, but at the same time, this means I'm forced to answer yet another question, and I don't want to go around looking for random questions and spam irrelevant answers...  Now I'm stuck. So I try to talk to some other users in the chat rooms about how to go about getting reputation points and how they first started. I entered into a "casual chat room".     You must have 20 reputation on Meta Stack Overflow to talk here.   Yes... I can understand why this is enforced, because we don't want new users to spam chat rooms, but all I wanted to do was ask for help. So I can't even talk to anyone about my newbie problems. So okay, I'll just settle for upvoting comments in the question that helped me. I don't see an upvote hover-over button so I can't even do that.    So now I'm stuck at 1 reputation point, unable to cross that 15 rep barrier, and even after posting this question I'll only have 6 rep points and still unable to do anything, and I'll be forced to look for questions to answer. Yes, I should be contributing to the community, but I shouldn't need to begin answering or making questions to upvote questions and answers. This only spurs more spam/irrelevant answers if anything.   Very, very, very new-user unfriendly.
124152
I've seen a few questions I'd like to comment on or give a different answer, but seeing how I don't have 50 reputation (I've been a lurker for years, finally decided to participate) do I really need to ask a few questions before I can comment/answer other people's stuff? Or am I missing something here?  Sorry if this has been answered before, but with a few search tries I couldn't find any similar stuff, even tried google just for "50 reputation stackoverflow" but that didn't give me anything either.
79284
I understand that reputation can be gained by answering questions. However, it seems that more often than not the questions do not contain all the required information to give an answer. Since new users can not comment questions and ask for more details, this creates a sort of catch-22.  Any good advice on how to get initial reputation, given the new user restrictions?
19176
I was thinking about this issue from time to time but I didn't know whether it really exists or just an speculation on my side until today when I woke up [!], I saw  downvoted (in the meantime I'll leave that answer unedited for the sake of discussion; note that this is just a sample. I'm not asking "how to deal with this specific answer." The question is completely general as it's nearly impossible to keep track of all of your answers to see whether they require updating or not). While the downvoter didn't explain a thing, I suspect the reason is that the answer is no longer applicable (It's one of the new features in iPhone OS 3.0). As we go to celebrate a long sequence of birthdays for Stack Overflow (hopefully!), we're going to see lots of answers become obsolete. How we're going to deal with this issue?
46780
It happens sometimes to receive or see a very good answer that arrives very late and that would deserve more upvotes. What can be done to give a boost to them? I would happily spend some of my reputation points to be able to give them such boost. This is not merely a question of reputation, but the idea is to let the answer &quot;bubble up&quot; faster so that it can be seen easily by other people to look into question. I hope I explained my question so that is understandable. Most of you got the point and there are some interesting proposals like the one that proposes to put randomly an answer at top. But I do have not enough experience to say if there is one that could solve the issue or not. I would be curious to know what Jeff thinks about it, if it feels there is something that can be improved or not.
49193
I use the Stack Exchange sites very often to find solutions to problems and help me with decision-making.  In some sites I have asked question and received answers, and I have more than 15 reputation. On Stack Overflow I have always found answers to my questions and never needed to post a question (avoiding duplicate questions). However, I would like to vote for the answers that helped me but I do not have the ability to do that, due to low reputation.  Posting a question or answering an answer on each site seems like the only way to get enough reputation.  Since I have no input to give in these areas unless they will be counted as duplications, many answers that I have already used are missing my vote.  I suggest to take into account all of the reputations from all Stack Exchange sites for voting, or thinking about a different way to allow votes.
4909
I was reviewing on , and I faced a weird thing. I can review "Close Votes", "Low Quality Posts", and "Suggested Edits" if I reached my daily vote limit, but I can't for "First Posts" and "Late Answers". Why?    If they just deserve an upvote/downvote then they should not include in the review system. But if we can improve them through leaving comments and by editing the posts then why can't we access them?
38153
I have found that if I upvote an answer, it gets upvoted, but if I downvote I receive a message that the vote is hidden until I have sufficient reputation points.  Here's an example from an answer on  - on which I have .  If I upvote:    It simply gets upvoted - isn't that nice!  The trouble is if I downvote an answer, I get a message saying my vote is hidden until I have 125 reputation points:    And here is an example of a question on , on which I have :      So either this is a straightforward network-wide bug, or this is a Stack Exchange policy to hide downvotes from users with less than 125 reputation points - in which case perhaps the wording of the message is ambiguous?
59819
I have seen a few  here on Meta&nbsp;Stack&nbsp;Exchange that cover parts of this, but they are often too local, and none of them seem to cover all the relevant scenarios.  I will break it up into multiple parts in order to make this more specific:     When should I vote on a question:   What are the qualifications for a question to be deserving of being up-voted? When shouldn't I vote up on a question? What are the things that would cause a question to need to be down-voted?   How should I go about down-voting the question (do I wait a little while to give the OP a chance to change it, or do I down-vote it immediately)?  When shouldn't I vote down on a question?  When should I vote on an answer:   What are the qualifications for an answer to be deserving of being up-voted? When shouldn't I vote up on an answer? What are the thing that would cause an answer to need to be down-voted?   How should I go about down-voting the answer (do I wait a little while to give the OP a chance to change it, or do I down-vote it immediately)?  When shouldn't I vote down on an answer?  When should I vote on a comment:   While votes on comments do not affect reputation points, it might be useful to new users to know when to up-vote them.    It seems that a full, comprehensive list of these would be invaluable to new users looking to figure out how the voting system works, but this list seems to be missing from the meta site.
51805
I have come across this scenario on several occasions where a user posts a comment that answers the question. When they receive positive feedback, they post it as an answer. Is this bad practice? In my own case, if I am not 100% sure I will comment first and see if that worked for the OP. Sometimes there are more than one problem and that is why I don't post an answer immediately. Here is an example  that illustrates the issue. Should the first commenter get the credit, or the first answerer?
23629
Most of the time, I don't need to ask questions to find the answers I am looking for. Because I just find all the answers on Stack Overflow. It is a huge resource of good tips, tricks and solutions. And by only looking around and searching (= ), my reputation stays at 1 of course.  But I also want to show my active participation by things like:   pointing out the answers that helped me out. somehow say "good answer, buddy, you saved my day today".   So no blablabla, just vote up the good stuff.  But I cannot. Frustrating.
102149
I've only been a member of SO for a couple of months but I must say that the site can be a bit daunting even for an experienced developer.  Part of this is because when users with very high reputations answer questions then it seems that everyone assumes that they have the right answer.  I don't want to go into the self-fulfilling nature of reputation increase for high reputation people.  But I think it is clear that people with high reputation scores get more upvotes () because people assume (usually accurately) that they are correct.    But if reputation was hidden on SO, at least for, say, the first hour after a question is asked then the probability of the best answer being upvoted the most would surely increase.  This might also require the hiding of the names of the answerers if they have very high reps!  As a second method of getting improved answers I would correlate the value of an answer (in terms of reputation gained) with the difficulty of the question.  And the simplest way to do that would be based on the time required for the question to be answered.  So if a question is answered within a minute then it is a 20% question (2 points per upvote), within 2 minutes a 40% question, within 5 minutes a 60% question and so on, on to say a 200% answer (20 points per upvote) on questions that have been hanging around for months.  This would encourage considered answers to new questions and tempt people into reducing the backlog - rather than encouraging people to sit on the 'newest questions' hoping for a gimme.  These two measures would incentivise people to answer the questions that no-one likes the look of and reduce the relative value of answering easy questions.
107174
I often see new users posting questions and getting answers. But instead of getting an upvote or accept for the answer, they just add a comment that the answer helped them.  I understand that you need 15 points minimum for upvote.  I often see people then commenting "when you are happy, please accept / upvote".  My impression is that the new users don't really know about the upvote/accept business.  So my idea is if the system could send them some automatic and more explicit message when they have earned > 15 (or another threshold) points in the sense of "Now you have x points, and posed some questions. Please review the questions and vote / accept answers given"
77015
I am new to Stack Exchange.  Math and physics newsletters get to my inbox every Thursday, and every Thursday there are 5-day-old answers to questions as I read them for the first time.  Too often a question of interest  has already been closed because of the low quality of recent answers and comments.  I have no reputation, and to do almost anything requires more reputation than I have.  Nothing I have found in Help helps (however I noted one user submitted an "answer" because he said he did not have the reputation to comment.  I have started wondering if Joseph Heller is looking over my shoulder.  Any help, please?  Thank you to those who made useful suggestions.  The question, "How does a new user begin using Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange?," clearly expressed my difficulties.  I would close the question if I knew how.  Good night.
103998
I asked a question on SO and someone gave me the answer as a comment to the question. Subsequently, someone else gave the same answer as an answer.  I would like to give credit to the poster who made the comment. Is there any way to do that?   Being new to the site, my only thought would be to contact the commenter and tell him to post an answer if he/she wants credit.
27043
Someone else has already asked a question about the exact same problem that I am having. Unfortunately, the question does not have an answer yet. Follow-on questions to the original poster have gone unanswered. How do I get an answer to that question?  I can't upvote the question unless I have 15 reputation.  I don't have an answer to the question (yet), although I do have some more information about my particular instance of that problem that may lead to an answer. I don't see how to just comment on the question.  What choice do I have other than to start a new post with the same question (and be responsive when anyone replies)?
83513
Summary: High reputation users on SO come swooping in the second a simple question is posted, and get the first answer in before I've even opened my Python interpreter to test my idea out.  This actually is a problem because it prevents use lower users who aren't as good  at programming from getting any answers in.  This makes it very hard to build up reputation.  Thus, I propose a short dead time for high reputation users where their answers do not appear.  The Problem: This isn't just reputation.  By answering questions and having discussions with OP, we all get better at our language.  Teaching is one of the best ways of learning, and a more well versed population is absolutely good for SO.  (If anyone wants to argue that, go home)  While its nice to have folks who can quickly answer nearly all questions in a jiffy, its a little frustrating for those of use who simply aren't as fast, but still want to contribute.  The result is that many people do not answer questions because they feel like they just can't get an edge in.  SO should aim to incentivize as many answers by as many users as possible.  The most answers from the most users is the most beneficial situation for the site and the community. Once we accept this idea, it is clear that something needs to be done to address the issue at hand    The Solution: Luckily, this is an easy problem to solve; we use a dead time.  High reputation users can post answers whenever they like, but they won't appear until after the dead time is completed.  The trick is balance, a dead time which is too long will harm the OP as the question will remain unanswered, however, a dead time which is too short won't actually fix the problem.  There definitely needs to be a discussion about what "high reputation" means and what dead time to use, but it should be independent of whether y'all agree that this is a problem.  So, what do you think?  EDIT: Wow, -18, I leave for lunch for 30 minutes and this is what happens!  I guess y'all think this is a bad idea, but let me try to clarify a few things on which I was unclear earlier.  This is not about reputation.  This is not about getting the first answer just for the sake of getting to say "in before..."  This is about learning.  By getting a shot at answering questions before the high reputation users, people learn. Think of it as doing an example problem in class before the teacher does it. You get a chance to try it yourself, test your knowledge, and if you fail, then the teacher is right behind you to show the correct solution.  This is what I'm trying to accomplish. However, seeing the solution, and then trying to answer the question, is not very helpful. This is how I view the status quo.    In response to Mr. Pieters' answer and comments: You're absolutely right, this is not about quantity, its about quality.  The fastest answer isn't always the best.  But asking the high reputation users to take a step back for a few minutes is a means of getting there.    Hopefully this clears things up a bit.