I am not sure whether this is a help request or a feature request, so I'm (at first) asking for help. Often, when I downvote a question/answer and a message &quot;Please consider adding a comment if you think this post can be improved.&quot; appears, I see there is already a comment explains why this question/answer is not good. What should I do then? If I will ignore the pop-up, the user will not be able to understand the reason for my downvote. But duplicating the comment is not acceptable, of course. The best I can think of is upvoting the comment, but this does not clearly explains the correlation between the two.
124075
Possible Duplicate:          Is down-voting on SO supposed to be anonymous? I ask because it does not seem to me to be.  Example:   I asked a question today. I got 3 good and 1 mediocre responses. I voted up the two that helped me and accepted the one that worked best. A while later, several new comments from one person appeared, to which I responded (since they were questions for me), and then that same person posted a new answer. This answer was crap. The person missed the whole point of the question and gave vague "pseudo-code" (and calling it that is generous) that basically restated my question.   Though I try to use down votes sparingly, especially when someone takes the time to answer a question I asked, I really want to down vote his answer. However, if I do, then my "reputation" will report "-1 downvoted" today. Since we've been going back and forth in the comments (in my failed attempt to explain the question to him), it's fairly likely that he'll peg me for the down vote.   In rumaging through the his reputation, I noticed that he gets down voted a lot. Moreover, he often votes down things on the same day as he gets down voted. Looking at a few recent questions where he posted an answer that was down voted, it's pretty clear that he (often successfully) down votes questions or competing answers when he is down voted, perhaps based on comments or, as is easier, based on profiles where down votes are recorded.  In this particular case, it's worth it for me to down vote him because (1) it's a stupid answer, (2) I don't live and die by my SO reputation, and (3) it really wasn't a great question that I asked. However, this does bring up the larger point that perhaps a date should not be associated with a down vote.
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I'm looking around for answers to my questions on several Stack Exchange sites and the good boy that I am I don't want to ask duplicate questions.  Often I find that there are other people who asked the same questions, sometimes years earlier, but still don't have an answer. I'd figure I could bump these back to top, but if I don't have enough rep for a edit (or comment), how would I do that?  Or, in that case, I should just post a 'newer' version of the same question?
107170
When I try to flag a comment, I am offered the following possibilities.   rude or offensive not constructive obsolete too chatty other..     Which of them should I choose in situation when a comment contains something which would qualify as spam, i.e., post containing the same content would be ?  Admittedly, typically the spammers do not have  to post comments in other places than under their posts. (Which is the situation I saw a while ago and it prompted me to ask this.) In the specific situation, that I have already flagged the post, there is no need to do about the comment right?  I assume that the situation that a spammer would have enough rep to post comments anywhere is probably very rare (if it happenst at all). Still I would like to know also what to do in such situation.  TL;DR: If a spam comment is posted under an answer I already flagged, should I flag also the comment? What should I do in (probably very rare) situation when a spam comment is posted under a post (answer/question) which does not contain spam?
43850
Allow converting comments to answers, so they can become accepted answers.  I asked a question. Someone commented on it, and it was an awesome comment that fully answered the question. As the original questioner, I would like to convert that comment to an answer in order to accept it.  Or, if you prefer, I would be okay with being able to simply mark the comment as accepted.
41269
Let me say first that I am fairly new here (about 3 weeks) and absolutely love Stack Overflow. At first I let some of the negative attitudes get to me a little, left a few snarky comments, but that phase has passed. I see the tremendous value for this site in the long run and sincerely do want to help make it a better place.  I find myself going for  the downvote very frequently -- currently about 35% of my votes are downvotes. I even make an extra effort to upvote good content to offset this a bit, so the number should probably be more like 60%. I always try to leave constructive comments and try to help out the confused ones who are really trying.  I truly can't tell if it is just me, or if these folks deserve it. I don't know if you guys noticed, but there are a lot of really bad questions being posted, and a lot of people trying to pass off things like "use jQuery", "use Firebug", and "use Google" as good answers (and getting upvotes!). I even saw someone copy/paste my "What does Firebug say?" comment as an answer and get 3 votes within moments. Sometimes This answer is unclear or not useful just doesn't do it justice.  I feel like some of the people just drive me nuts, but then again I feel this way IRL :) Am I being too harsh, or is it really that bad on SO? Has there recently been a surge of new users, and the quality of content is degrading, or was it like this in the "good old days"? Have I perhaps misunderstood the expected behavior on Stack Overflow -- should I just ignore these crappy questions and answers rather than downvote them?
73255
While reviewing "First Posts" on Stack Overflow, I often come across new users posting comments as answers. It seems (at least to me) they are not doing this because they are unaware of how Stack Overflow works but because they can't comment on any question they are forced to put it as answer.  I have found duplicate questions for my request like:   ,  and    but the best explanation I have found is an  to .     I think the main reason this isn't supported is there's no way to   downvote comments, which would make them attractive to spammers. If   somebody comments on the top answer in a question the only way to get   rid of it is for six people to flag it. Comment flags don't show up on   10k tools, so it needs to be six people that happen to stumble across   the spam comment, or a moderator that checks the list manually. People   can comment every 15 seconds, so that can get out of hand pretty   quickly. Comments also aren't listed on the user's profile page, so   it's hard to see at a glance if a user has been spamming   So I am suggesting allowing new users (with less than 50 reputation points) to comment only 5 times every day or only 25 times times until they reach 50 reputation points or any other variation of it.
40461
Answers and questions allow both upvoting and downvoting - comments, however, only allow upvoting.  I think it would be useful to allow downvoting of comments for two reasons:   First, if you accidentally upvoted a comment you didn't intend to Second, if you strongly believe that a comment is , misleading, incorrect or off topic
67755
When you click the add a comment button when you don't have enough rep, you get a pop-up saying that you need more rep in able to comment. Except, it is too far away and users might be confused for a while before realizing the pop-up is on the other side of the page:     Clearly, that is very inconvenient for a lot of people, like me. Can we move the pop-up to be right next to the add a comment button?
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?
63683
It's very common to ask for additional information on a question.  This is perhaps most common with new users who are a little unfamiliar with the need to put all relevant information in their question to start with.  To be blunt, I'm a little tired of explaining to new users that an edit is better than a comment, particularly where we ask "please add the output of..." I note that some users have taken to explicitly asking OPs to edit their question and adding an edit link in their comment.  But still this is missed.  More recently, adding a comment to a new user's question displays a little note saying:     ... is a new contributor. Be nice, and check out our Code of Conduct.   Could there be a similarly formatted note to new contributors commenting on their own question or answer:     If you need to add more information please  your [question][answer] instead of adding a comment.
20682
Problem: A lot of the time I downvote something that clearly shows lack of research or effort on OP's part, and when they edit to improve it, I usually find out pretty late, because there are no notifications to help with that.  Proposition: add a Get notified when this post is edited button/checkbox under a post which you have downvoted (per post, not just all posts ever), so that if there is a significant improvement, you could remove your downvote or even change it to an upvote to show you recognize the improvement.  I believe this would improve public thinking about votes, and make people (who choose to participate like this on the SE sites more often) vote more freely and more often, and everybody else would not think of a &lt;0 post score as a death sentence for their contribution.  I'm not asking to enable this on SO (for a number of obvious reasons), and that's why I propose an opt-in subscription. This would be most useful on lower activity sites like the SE, in my opinion, but who knows.    I want to know if someone has improved their post after a downvote to reinforce the positive behavior and I get -4 on my good intentions? What kind of culture are you trying to cultivate? Please, explain why you disagree without silently downvoting. If you think there's a better way, yes, I want to know your thoughts.
25750
Prologue:  This is an effort to follow up on  which is marked as a duplicate of  highly voted and status-declined feature request (although they seem to be different, one focusing on the OP and the other on the downvoter).   My New Year's resolution was to downvote more.  So on January 3rd or so, I saw a post that was low quality, and downvoted.  Two days later, I came back to see if it was ready to be deleted or had gotten piled with downvotes, to find it with a significant positive score!  At which point, I noticed that the answer had been significantly improved.  So I retracted my downvote, changed it to an upvote, and immediately resumed my dearth of downvoting again.  I think I have a responsibility to downvote bad posts, despite that oh-so-painful -1 rep penalty.  But if I am also going to have the responsibility to follow up on every downvote I cast, I'm not going to bother. I don't want my downvote to leave a residual penalty on posts that were once low quality, and I am not going to trouble myself to keep checking up on every post I downvoted.  Can a downvoter have an option to be notified when a post they voted down was edited?  I wouldn't make this an automatic thing, because not all downvoters want it, and it isn't applicable to all cases of downvoting (although  that this should be part of the responsibility of a downvoter).  Personally, I would make this a universal toggle on-off option on the user profile page, not a question-by-question option, but I don't have strong feelings about it.
48138
Meanwhile, in August 2009  as reason for comment flagging, and the comment flags show in the 10k tools. And  is on its way. Hence: I don't care for this request myself anymore. An explicit [status-declined] would be fine.    What about being able to set comments to auto-expire? Or, alternatively, set a comment to be removable by the author of the question or answer one comments on?  This way the communities would allow for some personal or funny comments (even like "Thanks") without those comments littering the sites forever. Or, when the original author is allowed to clean up, then comments that have been taken care of by editing the question or answer, could be removed.  Why?  As, , there's no way to send a personal message to other members, I find myself abusing the comments like some "poor man's private messaging system". I try to refrain from things like "Thank you", but sometimes I do want to point out something to someone. After a while (hours, days) I then  to remove them (hoping that no-one actually replied to them with another comment, like "Thanks, fixed it").  Like :    (I don't find this feature request very important (at all), I am quite impressed by what's been given us already, and I doubt there's a way to implement it without making things too confusing. Maybe I'm just trying too hard to keep things tidy and clean. Still, I wanted to share it, just in case someone comes up with something very clever...)
97849
It happened to me that I found a solution to an older question. This question was commented by many people with comments like "very interesting, important, ..." such that I thought that my answer has also some value. My answer was the only one. It was upvoted and accepted by the asker. However, I assume, that very few of the "commentators" saw my answer, because the system does not inform automatically about new answers.   I think it would have been helpful for me and the commentators when they would get informed. I could achieve this by adding my own comment to their comments, because this triggers a system message. My question is: would this action be considered admissible or not? Are there some other possibilities?
2824
I think more reputation points should be required to add a new answer than to upvote an existing answer.  I don't continually watch for new questions, so usually when I find a question it has already been answered.  It seems bit inappropriate to answer an already-answered question in order to contribute to the conversation, but until you earn reputation, you can't upvote or comment; you can only add new answers, which prevents me from contributing at the moment as much as I would like to.  This seems backwards to me. If someone incorrectly upvotes a bad answer, the damage is minimal, as other users can down vote it and upvote the correct answers. On the other hand, an incorrect answer wastes the time of everyone who reads it.  So, IMHO, it should require more reputation points to add an answer than to upvote or comment on an existing answer.  I wouldn't say say that users should be prevented from answering unanswered questions until they have x reputation points, as that might prevent users who have answers from providing them, but perhaps it should be required if the question is already answered, to discourage users from reiterating previously given answers.  What do you think?
85358
I'm annoyed by down voters that don't explain why they down voted a question or an answer. Although, at the same time, I understand that they . I think there is a middle ground, though, where the voter can remain anonymous, while the poster can get aggregated feedback on ways to improve the post.  Rather than having to imagine what it might be like, the current stackoverflow engine can emulate this rather effectively with the use of comments and the up-voting of those comments (essentially saying "I agree"). So I thought I would give it a try. The only difference is that in this testing post, you will always see the list of "canned responses" where as in the complete version, it will most likely be hidden in a popup (e.g. when you hover over the score of an answer/question). To try it out, simply up or down vote this question (or one of its answers), and press the up arrow next to the comment which best describes why are voting that way. For example, if you hate this idea, give this a down vote, and then press the up arrow near -1: I don't like this idea.  In addition to retaining anonymity, this will also save time for the voter so that they don't need to write out the comment. This wouldn't be required, obviously, and there could be a default option selected don't leave a reason. In addition, there could be a custom option which allows you type exactly why you are down-voting this way. Depending on the final implementation, this could either simply be converted to a comment automatically prefixed with -1:  or +1:; or, to retain anonymity, it would be added to this same list that shows the canned responses and how many users have voted that way.  Here are some ideas for the canned responses:  Question:   +1: Well formatted and thought out question. -1: It doesn't seem like enough time was spent trying to solve this issue on your own. -1: I don't like this idea. (Could be especially useful on meta.stackoverflow.com feature-request.) -1: No prior research/work. (Idea from .) -1: Poor question. Please see . -1: Doesn't contain code. (This would be useful on stackoverflow.com. Idea from )   Answer:   +1: Concise. +1: Insightful. +1: Worked for me. -1: It's wrong. -1: Confusing. -1: Encouraging bad behavior (e.g. answering a question that shouldn't have been asked; see ).   I made this a community-wiki since there will probably be testing of up/down votes. Several of these canned responses have been taken from . This same idea was also .
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It's sad to upvote a comment on a post that's subsequently updated in a way that renders the comment obsolete and not be able flag it afterwards.  There may well be other cases where one would want to flag an upvoted comment too.  Related:     From November '09:  Note that this was before comment votes could be undone, so one slip and you were stuck.  The suggested solution there is to flag the post instead with a note about which comment to look at which is inelegant and potentially a problem as flagging a post can have repercussions beyond just bringing it to the mods' attention. From June '10:  Also pre-, which is presumed to address the problem, except that it doesn't in this case.     So here it is nearly three years later and this question lingers unresolved.  It's been positively received (no downvotes yet!), but hasn't gotten any developer response.  The problem that this change would address is still a problem.  The UI as implemented is still confusing: flags are generally orthogonal to votes on questions and answers, so why do comments take an either/or approach?  Comments are purposely second-class citizens, but this seems like privileging them--protection for comments that should be removed!