ORIGINAL QUESTION (before the &quot;possible duplicate&quot; tag was added): Could someone please look at the last few comments under the main question at  I can find no valid (posted) policy why I am not allowed to answer the question. If there is such an official policy as &quot;the association bonus does not count&quot; please post a link to it in response to this question. REVISED QUESTION (after the &quot;possible duplicate&quot; tag was added): Apparently this question has morphed quite a bit. As I detail in my own answer to this question below (I used an answer to include screengrab images) there is a discrepancy between the two different Stack Exchange sites. There is also a discrepancy between the official policy on reputation and this &quot;does not count&quot; tangent policy that is not mentioned in the official policy. Can someone please tell me why: (1) If &quot;doesn't count&quot; is official policy why is it not in the official policy page on reputation? (2) If this is official Stack Exchange-wide policy then why are there different messages on different sites, some mentioning &quot;doesn't count&quot; and other not? (3) If &quot;doesn't count&quot; is official policy why did it change? Our co-founder Jeff Atwood wrote an official description of the purpose of cross-site association bonus points:  Nowhere in that description do I see an exception for protected questions.
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I registered on  only to post an answer to .  However, since it's a protected question, I am not allowed to answer it. (I found this info from ).  Worth to mention, I can comment on the above question, just not post an answer.  I was under the impression that the whole point of association bonus was to bypass such limits, so why isn't that the case for answering protected questions?
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I figured out a method to abuse the Association Bonus, however I'm unsure whether or not this is a serious issue. Are there anti systems in place that prevent this?       Prerequisites: 1 account with the Association bonus, and 1 account with 100 reputation on a different site.      Step 1: Create a bounty on the first account using the association bonus on the site on which the second account has 100 reputation, and award it to the second account.  The second account now has 200 reputation and will receive the Association Bonus.    Step 2: Abuse the bounty system to give the association bonus from the second account back to the first.    Step 3: Create a third account, and again abuse the bounty system to gift 200 reputation to it from the second account.  Step 4: Repeat steps 2 and 3 in order to gain infinite reputation.    Step 5: Give the 200 reputation back to the first account.    Please don't actually do this.
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I was able to see , which has been flagged as not an answer, while going through the review tools. Is this supposed to be possible, or is this a glitch? If it's meant to be possible - what's the point of it? Surely being the OP I'm going to be biased and most likely wish to choose to disagree with the flags...    update:   I've been able to select "flag or disagree" and then say "I disagree"...   So, would there be some gaming involved here, if I was to agree with the flag, then delete my own answer (would I get a helpful flag for that), then undelete it (still leave my answer there)...?  However, as expected, it now appears to have disappeared from the queue as expected (or at least I assume it has, as it hasn't appeared in the 50 from multiple page reloads anyway...)  And here it is in flag history:
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Here's a counter-example of the expected gold circle icon:    Compare with:    I'm not certain of when the powers came into play, precisely, but since FredOverflow is neither a moderator nor the owner of that post, I can't see how else he would have marked it as a duplicate single-handedly except for this gold badge power.  Unless I'm missing something&hellip;
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Please refer to the following question:    The  had posted an  a while back.  I posted a comment referring to the same and voted to close the question as a duplicate of the referenced question.  Surprisingly, an auto comment saying "possible duplicate of ..." was not generated.  I agree that the referenced question shows up in the linked questions list but an auto comment ought to be generated.  Seems like a bug.    EDIT: I understand that the above behavior is by-design.  However, I'd say that the behavior in the following case should also be the same:  It's interesting to see that the auto comment would be generated if you were to add a comment linking to an answer and then voting to close the question as duplicate.  For example, observe the following question:
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I've been trying to break the 15 barrier for about 2 years now (much less the 50 barrrier!), and I want to try and answer this question:    But the question needs some clarification before I can answer it. How can I get this clarification if I can't post a comment? Or do I just have to sit this one out?
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My Area51 account crossed 200 rep today, but still other accounts don't reflect the change in reputation. When will the changes be applied? or is there no association bonus for Area51 account?
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Possible Duplicate:             I came from Stack Overflow where I participate more frequently, but now I had an issue that I found would be better to be posted on Server Fault, because configuring LDAP isn't a programming topic. It’s my first posting there, which results in enormous restrictions:    I cannot post my answer I had to remove the links   This is caused by the reputation restrictions. They are justified for users which are new to the system, but as more and more Stack Exchange sites arise to separate topics, I think if you have once understood the idea of Stack Exchange, you don’t have to be educated on each site again.  So I would like to propose a sharing of the reputation across all Stack Exchange sites.
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This happened to me twice. Someone flags my question as duplicated and only when I visit the question I notice the comment. Before I had no proof, but today I have *evil laughter*.  This is the notifications:        I count 4, remember this number.        Lets see... umm... 1, 2, 3... 5! HA! So, there are 5 comments and one of them (the one that flagged the question as dupe) didn't get into my inbox. So, is this by design or I really should get notified?  If this is by-design, I disagree.  Note to self: I suspect other canned comments doesn't reach the OP, like the custom close reason.
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I got  question in review. First sentence is:     I know there is a  question, but no answers.   And indeed the two questions are virtually identical. I started to flag as duplicate - but the original question had no answer at the time, so it wouldn't be correct and apparently . (I didn't go so far as to try to submit the flag).  What is the proper action here? How do we want such a question to be handled? Should both (or more) questions stay open indefinitely until either is answered and somebody gets the good idea to do the duplicate linking?   As the new question is essentially a bump to the front page (perhaps with re-tagging), especially in the case where the OP knows that a previous question exist, perhaps something should be done to enable bumping re-emphasizing without writing the new question.  As I wrote this,  actually got an answer. So the old one should now be closed as a duplicate of the new - but my question remains for the case where all known/found duplicate questions have no answer?  Ironically, just before asking this, the "Questions that may already have your answer" gave me ... (Although the suggestion has no answer). So it has been asked before - the comment there even suggest the ability to re-emphasize.
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I am a non-20k-er on many sites. What am I supposed to do when I encounter a not-an-answer?   Flag it as not an answer? Downvote it? All of the above?   I have 20k reputation on one of the sites. What am I supposed to do when I encounter a not-an-answer there?   Flag it as not an answer? Downvote it? Vote to delete it, if it has negative score? All of the above?   And if the answers to these two questions are "all of the above", why do we need to separate it into multiple actions? Why not have flagging as not-an-answer automatically issue a downvote and, if possible, a delete vote?
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(currently deleted (visible only to 10kers)) is a great example of a duplicate question that should not be deleted. [Note: this question was later merged into , which resulted in the original being hard-deleted. This issue with merging  ] The titles of the duplicates are completely different.  Having duplicates around greatly aids search hits on the site. We need to keep questions like this around for the benefit of the community. Both questions have around 4K views.  They are both relevant.  I cannot believe that a question with over 3K views is being deleted. Edit Search for python continue line and python line break in google.  Both answers are top hits.  They should both be open.
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For 15K users protect option is supposed to work :     the question must have at least one answer by a new user aka a user with &lt; 10 rep on the site (which is the required rep limit to answer protected questions)    made me wonder if there is a off-by-one error in calculation somewhere. At the moment of writing  its author has only 9 rep on site (6 from one answer and 3 from one question) but protection link isn't displayed to 15K users.  I additionally checked that question is more than a day old:  this is enough for protect option to become available.
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Related:  (not a dupe, that's a feature request and was closed as a dupe of another one)        (old) post does indeed say that Link-only answers can be flagged as NAA, but there are a lot of posts like  which define Not An Answer is a way that it doesn't apply to link-only answers.  Can we get some up-to-date consensus on this? That link only answers are not allowed is .
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Earlier today, I marked a question on Stack Overflow as a duplicate. Then I waited about 5-10 minutes and it showed 5 people. However, my name wasn't included.  I also remember that the question that was linked on top was the same question that I selected.  Now I'm not trying to ask for the "spotlight" but I just want to know how does this naming system work? Do they go in order or do they go by reputation?
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Just browsing and came across , but the post notice doesn't have a link to the duplicate:
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The new notice for protected questions looks like this:     Earn 10 reputation in order to answer this question. The reputation requirement helps protect this question from spam and non-answer activity.  The phrasing of this notice leaves out a lot of info, and is incorrect in many cases:  In the case where the user has just created their account on the site (whether or not they have the association bonus of +100), the default 1 for signing up does count toward the required 10. The message implies that the user has to earn 10 more reputation for a total of 11 (or 111), while the actual requirement is 10 (or 110).  If the user just registered and started off with the association bonus, then later lost part of it (e.g. through bounties or making a downvoted post), earning 10 reputation is not enough to answer protected questions. According to the literal wording of the notice, earning 10 reputation is enough regardless of previous rep loss, but this is not the case.   The easiest fix that can be made, to at least fix part of the problem, would be to explicitly indicate that the association bonus does not count. This was implemented in the prior protected question notice in response to , but was omitted from the new notice. This omission  , and adding this back would remove that. Can we please fix this notice?