I know that putting a link to your blog in a signature is frowned upon and rightly so.  Is it okay to link to your blog in an answer if that blog post answers the question?  Are there other situations where it would be acceptable to promote your own web site in a question or answer?  Related:
34771
I would like to help my fellow Stackizens, using material from my blog or other website.  But external links are sometimes viewed as excessive promotion.  From the FAQ:     Be careful, because the community   frowns on overt self-promotion and   tends to vote it down and flag it as   spam. Post good, relevant answers, and   if they happen to be about your   product or website, so be it. However,   you must disclose your affiliation in   your answers. Also, if a huge   percentage of your posts include a   mention of your product or website,   you're probably here for the wrong   reasons.   I have tried posting answers that reference my blog, and I have followed the above rules, but my answers still get flagged as spam.  How can I craft an answer that references my blog, website or other resource, but is still acceptable to the community?
113307
Sometimes as the OP (question asker), after reading through all the answers, I have my own sum-up about them. I want to tell people and all further readers about my feeling and comprehension about my desired answer and how all the answers helped towards solving my problem.  Where's the correct place to put that information? Things I've considered:   Edit into my question: No because that's not part of the question A comment under the question: I dislike that due to limited formatting in comments and its subject to removal (though the latter won't be the case) A comment under the highest-scored or the accepted answer: Still the same reason above. This is, for the time being, the place I'm posting that. A separate answer: Those thoughts probably don't qualify as an answer
30233
With all the changes to licensing currently being discussed is it acceptable to edit my questions/answers to include a footnote.     This question/answer is provided .   I know some people are suggesting that this might be placed in a profile, but until I review all my content I don't want to blanket CC0 everything.
109755
Sometimes I find that I'll post an answer on an SO question that, for whatever reason -- probably luck, most of the time -- climbs to the top by votes, beating out other answers with equally (sometimes more) useful information.  At times like this I feel strangely obligated to also mention some of the same points made by those whose answers haven't received as many votes, just so that info doesn't get "lost" to someone who's only looking at the top-voted response for a quick answer.  I understand that the main purpose of SO is to provide good, thorough answers to technical programming questions; so I feel like this is the right thing to do. However, I also appreciate that many users (myself included) can get caught up in the rep game, which adds an element of fun to the site. So I always include links to the answers mentioned in cases like these, so that the user who originally made the point I'm repeating (hopefully) gets credit for it.  But the thing is, I suspect that simply by including that information in my own answer, I'm perhaps unfairly collecting even more votes for myself, simply by making my already top-voted answer that much more comprehensive.  So, my question is: which is better? Should you include references to others' answers in your own, effectively repeating what they've already said; or should you simply let those answers stand on their own, even if it means they might be more easily overlooked?
20623
The basic scenario is that, in the course of answering a question, I might do a few searches and not really find a suitable link for additional information. If I've got some spare time and I'm familiar with the topic, it may make sense for me to write up an appropriate document, revisit my answer, and add the link.  Similarly, I might have some old code lying around that can be tidied up fairly quickly and contributed as an example - but it may be too big to just insert into an answer. A few snippets to illustrate the principle makes sense, but providing the full example has value too.  The problem is, where do I put these things?  I have a couple of options, of course - free ISP web space, free web hosts, a commercial host aimed at small sites, free file hosting etc - but they don't really seem quite appropriate to me.  The issue is that, like the questions and answers, I think these contributions should be editable by the community.  Is there a good or approved way to handle this kind of thing? Is it a real problem at all?
88436
On Stack&nbsp;Overflow, I'm a pretty frequent contributor with over 3K in reputation. Almost all of which earned by answering real user questions about Windows programming and other topics.  Last night, somone posted a .  I knew the easiest thing to do would be to direct him to an appropriate documentation page on MSDN that I thought would help. And I literally did this:   Copied the URL directly into the post. Below the URL, copied two lines of content from that page that was relevant. Small code snippit below that.   Literally, this is what the answer looked like:           This warning is automatically promoted to an error. If you wish to   modify this behavior, use #pragma warning. For example, to make C4235   into a level 2 warning, use the following line of code  #pragma warning(2:4235)    I felt that by cutting and pasting a quote from the website, and attributing it with the URL was proper form. Such that it's not ambiguous where the answer originated from - both from a copyright perspective as well as a courteous to the content owner.  About an hour later, I observed two things:   One moderator downvoting the answer and flagging it because "Copy/pasting. Nice. Did you see "© 2011 Microsoft. All rights reserved" at the bottom of that page" Another moderator deleted it with just a link to the FAQ - which says nothing about cut and paste or copyright rules.   Well that was disappoining. It wasn't like I was pasting a writeup without giving credit to the original author. Just a small quote from a well known reference site.  So here's my questions:   What is the policy around answers coming from other online reference sources? Is pasting a URL to a page with an answer OK? Is pasting content from the URL OK?  Even if it's attributed? Is there a proper way to attribute content when it originates from another site? Is there a proper way to attribute an answer if it originates elsewhere? Was I wrong to paste a snippet of content from MSDN, or was I wronged by aggressive moderators?   Now here's the real kicker - my day job is a software engineer at Microsoft. I am certain that my employer would not take issue at all with me helping the Windows development community by referencing pages they publish. So in some sense, the Stack&nbsp;Overflow communinity is just making it harder for the Windows experts to help the Windows community. It seems odd.
10445
I wanted to link to an answer to a Stack Overflow question, but couldn't find a way to do it. I couldn't get the ID of the answer in order to create the link.  How can you get the permalink for an answer to a question?
5796
I'm adding a blog to a site. Would it be better for SEO to put it at blog.example.com or at www.exampleblog.com?  I already own www.exampleblog.com .  Would combining the words together to exampleblog have a negative effect?
107309
Is it legal republish any article with Credits and Canonical Link?  After the end of the post I will mention a note like Originally published at www.example.com/post.  Additionally I will add a canonical tag too that post.
76350
. I did a trick:  I clicked on &quot;Ask Question&quot; here on Meta Then I clicked the icon &quot;Add image&quot; I uploaded the image from my computer and copied the link  I pasted the link to the comment I discarded the question.  Is this a clean and correct approach? An example thought why this possibly wouldn't be clean: Is the image hosted permanently? There could be, in theory, some &quot;garbage collector&quot; that would delete all images that are not linked from within any question (well, mine is now linked from this question, though not normally - funny enough right :-)).
92699
Instead of asking a question I would love to share the one or other code snippet I have created that is too small to make a full article on e.g. CodeProject.com or CodePlex.com.  Question: Would it be a good idea to post it as a Stack Overflow question? Or are there any other suggestions how to share it?  (Of course I could post it on my own weblog and then twitter about it, but I would love to put it in more of a programming context)
26045
If someone asks how to do XYZ, and you think doing XYZ at all is a Bad Idea™, is it valid to post an answer saying so? You aren't answering the question, but instead, arguing the question's validity.  You could do this in a comment, but I don't think comments carry enough weight on occasion.  For example, I came across this today ; for those not wanting to link away:     I would like to build a wiki based website about professors, so that students can share information and check the reputation of the professor before working for him.   and I really wanted to post an answer that said, "I think this is a very bad idea". (In fact I did anyway, despite awareness that it could get myself flamed.)  Was I wrong? What should I have done instead?
43789
Sometimes you spend a day or more solving a technical problem, and when you finally solve it, you may want to post it on your blog (if you have one) to share with the community.  However, most developers don't have a lot of time to update their blogs, and that is why personal blogs are not ranked very highly on Google/Bing.  So even if you describe a brilliant idea, chances are that, except a few of your friends, nobody will ever find it. This is a common reason why some developers start their blogs and soon give up; it is not interesting to write for the community if you have no feedback on your posts.  Unlike personal blogs, Stack Exchange sites are highly ranked in Google (I was amazed when I saw that a question asked on SO just an hour ago appeared 3rd in my Google search!), so if your question and answer are valuable for others, they will be rated highly and will be visible for other developers.  With this in mind, is it good practice to post a question and answer it yourself immediately when you want to share an idea with the community?
6686
The  are awesome.  How much more awesome would it be to be able to make a comment linking to one of the URLs covered by a magic link, but with custom text?  Since the square-bracket link type isn't included in the mini-markdown used for comments, it could be stolen for this purpose.  Comment text like    Please [add that information][edit] to the body  of your post rather than using comments.   or   Please [include the shortest possible amount of code that demonstrates the problem you see][mcve].   would convert to   Please [add that information](http://{SITE}.stackexchange.com/posts/{ID}/edit)  to the body of your post rather than using comments.   and    Please [include the shortest possible amount of code that demonstrates the problem you see](http://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve).   for example.
71889
I have been viewing a lot of first posts from new users. I often see answers such as "thanks", or "me too", or they are asking a different question altogether. I like to point out the fact that they will eventually be able to comment their opinions and upvote answers that they like. So I would like to have a comment such as     Hello user, and welcome to [main]. It is great that the answer helped you, however, that is not the purpose of adding an answer. Soon enough, with just a little bit of work, you will gain [help/privileges/comment] and be able to comment and upvote answers that help you.   [privileges] would link to the site's privilege page, and /comment would link to the page in privileges that talks about commenting. Hash tags could be used to indicate any section of the privileges page. , because each privilege is a different page, the magic links would have to be slashes. For example    - Comment page  - Established user  - Protect Questions   This would work similar to the FAQ magic link comments
57158
Sometimes a question I ask will get answers that don't help me, or maybe it doesn't receive any answers at all.  How about making a notification when somebody links to my question?   It could be something like this:     New information regarding your question might be available at {link}   It might help me getting an answer from related questions that weren't there when I first asked the question.
51267
I was answering  question and was trying to post following url in comments but everytime it failed -    I searched on Meta and came across  post and tried the solution posted but url is already encoded and doesn't work.   Is there a way to make this work in comments?