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Is it okay to repost a question from another Q&A website/forum that was never answered there? Is that plagiarism?

I came across this question that is very similar to a problem I am currently encountering, and would really like to see an answer/response. Would it b e appropriate to copy and paste that question into a question on Stack Overflow?

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  • If you don't already hang out at the cooking site you may be interested to know that this - or something similar - was discussed in quite a big way over there in its meta. See this thread.
    – hawbsl
    Oct 26, 2010 at 13:01

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I'd suggest you restate it with your own words and simply link back to the discussion for reference purposes.

C/P could be problematic since you have no idea about the copyright of that question, additionally with posting it on SE it would change to CC-BY.

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    This should be okay. If you're having the same problem it should be easy enough to restate it in your own words and with your own code, output, and data (where applicable). At that point the link to the question on another forum will just be bonus information.
    – Bill the Lizard
    Oct 25, 2010 at 15:41
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I'm with Bobby on this one, you should write the problem up in your own words. I think it's important to point out, though, that the answer to this question changes depending on the other site's rules.

For example, if the other site is CC-BY, then go ahead and reuse with proper attribution. Other sites do this with SO's content (some of them following the rules, others not; check out the clone tag for more on that).

On the other hand, if the other site says that all of its content is copyrighted, then I'd write the problem up completely independently and just add a link that says "there's discussion about a similar problem here, but it doesn't reach a definitive answer."

EDIT:
Found the related link I was thinking of this morning. There was a specific case of this happening with MSDN not too long ago. Check out the comments and Marc's answer.

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