Community FAQ
For sites in the Stack Exchange 2.0 network
To see a list of commonly used words and phrases, see the glossary.
For official guidance from Stack Exchange, visit the Help Center.
Asking questions
- How do I write a good title?
- How can I get answers fast?
- Where can I ask a question about finding general software that meets certain requirements?
- How should we deal with Google questions?
- What is the XY problem?
- How do I get attention for one of my own questions without a good answer?
- What can I do when getting "We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account"?
- What can I do when getting “This question body does not meet our quality standards”?
- Should questions include "tags" in their titles?
- Is cross-posting a question on multiple Stack Exchange sites permitted if the question is on-topic for each site?
- Do I have to worry about copyright issues for code posted on Stack Overflow?
Answering questions
- What is an acceptable answer?
- How do I write a good answer to a question?
- How should you respond to "Give me a fish" / RTFM questions?
- Is it acceptable to add a duplicate answer to several questions?
- Are answers that just contain links elsewhere really "good answers"?
- Can I answer my own questions, even if I knew the answer before asking?
Accepting answers
Working with posts
What does it mean when a question or answer is...
Why does the "Unanswered Questions" tab show questions that have answers?
Comments
- How do comments work?
- Why do I need 50 reputation to comment? What can I do instead?
- How do comment @replies work?
- How do I view the recent replies to things I have written?
- Is it acceptable to write a thank you in a comment?
Etiquette
- Are taglines & signatures disallowed?
- Are expletives (cursing, swear words or vulgar language) allowed on SE sites?
- Embrace the non-Googlers
- Thanking users who answered my question
- What is the etiquette for correcting old questions with incorrect answers?
- Etiquette for voting to close your own questions
- Answer or comment: what's the etiquette?
- What to do when plagiarism is discovered
- What should I do if a user posts sensitive information as part of a question or answer?
Promotion
- How can I link to an external resource in a community-friendly way?
- Limits for self-promotion in answers
- What are the “spam” and “rude or abusive” (offensive) flags, and how do they work?
Editing and Formatting
- How does editing work?
- How do suggested edits work?
- Why is the edit button disabled?
- What is a 'rollback'?
- Why can any user edit any other user's question or answer?
- How do I format my code blocks?
- Denoting keyboard shortcuts in Stack Exchange posts
- What HTML tags are allowed on Stack Exchange sites?
- How to nest code within a list using Markdown
- How do I create a screenshot to illustrate a post?
- How to upload an image to a post?
- What's the recommended syntax for an image with a link?
- What should I keep out of my posts and titles?
- Why does the Community user approve and reject edits?
- What is syntax highlighting and how does it work?
Tagging
- How do I search for questions with (or without) specific tags?
- How do I correctly tag my questions?
- How can we get rid of misspelled and unused (or "zombie") tags?
- What are tag synonyms and merged tags? How do they work?
- Filtering questions by multiple tags
- Why do we tag questions?
- What do icons on the tags mean?
- What do "watched tags" and "ignored tags" do?
- When should I create a new tag? How do I request a new tag if I don't have enough rep?
Reputation, badges, and voting
- How does "Reputation" work?
- How do "badges" work?
- How long does it take for badges to be awarded? How are they generated?
- What are the badges I can earn on each site, and what are the exact criteria for earning each badge?
- What is the association bonus, and how does it work?
- What are the limits on how I can cast, change, and retract votes?
- When should I vote?
- How does comment voting and flagging work?
- I've just been downvoted. How should I react?
- How do I audit my reputation?
- Why did I (not) receive a message saying I have been granted a privilege even though I (don't) have enough reputation?
- What are the limits and restrictions for new users?
- What is serial voting and how does it affect me?
- How does the SO voter fraud detection mechanism work?
- What does "user was removed" mean and why did my reputation change because of it?
- How do I read the history of my reputation?
- What are the reputation requirements for privileges on sites, and how do they differ per site?
Moderation
- Who are the diamond moderators, and what is their role?
- There's an election going on. What's happening and how does it work?
- What are the moderation tools available to 10,000+ reputation users?
- A guide to moderating chat
- Flagging a post for moderator review
- How do I properly use the "Not an Answer" flag?
- What are the “spam” and “rude or abusive” (offensive) flags, and how do they work?
- Should I edit a question or answer with offensive content?
- What is the etiquette for modifying posts?
- Should an answer that encourages illegal activity be marked as "Offensive"?
- Should moderators enforce NDAs for software vendors?
- I think I found some user accounts that should be merged; what do I do?
- Who is on the Community Management Team, and what does it do?
- What are the review queues, and how do they work?
- When is a review task "completed" or "invalidated"?
- What are the guidelines for reviewing?
- What are review tests (audits) and how do they work?
- What is a disputed flag?
- Why does flag marking as helpful/declined not always correlate with moderator action?
- When are moderator flags automatically dismissed as "aged away" by the system?
- What recourse do I have if I believe a moderator has abused their privileges?
- What does the Code of Conduct say about pronouns?
- When will CMs or moderators remove the [featured] tag from actively featured meta questions?
Searching and RSS feeds
- How do I search for questions with (or without) specific tags?
- How do I make search return results that actually contain all the search terms?
Accounts, registration and logging in
- Why should I register my account?
- How can one link / merge / combine / associate two accounts / users? (Anonymous / unregistered / cookie, or Google / Facebook / registered)
- How do I change my login provider(s)?
- How do I change my profile picture, or avatar?
- Why is my gravatar on Meta Stack Overflow different from my gravatar on Stack Overflow?
- How is the default user avatar generated?
- My account has been temporarily suspended; what does that mean?
- What can I do to lift or reduce a suspension?
- How can I delete my account?
- How do I contact other users?
- How can I log in to my Stack Exchange account if I'm unable to use my current account provider?
- I lost control of my account before registering. Can it be recovered?
- Why can't I use Stack Exchange if I'm under 13 years old, or if I'm under 16 years old and from the EU?
Other
- How often do CAPTCHAs appear?
- What is an SE "day"? When does each day start?
- Which browsers are officially supported, and what else do I need?
- Is Stack Overflow's content protected?
- Database schema documentation for the public data dump and SEDE
- What third-party tools are there for the trilogy websites?
- Who owns the content I post?
- What makes a winning site proposal?
- How can I propose a new site?
- What can cause a question to be bumped?
- How do I remove my name from a post, in accordance with CC BY-SA?
- Recent feature changes to Stack Exchange
- How are Stack Exchange sites officially branded?
- Which tools and technologies are used to build the Stack Exchange Network? (blog post)
- List of unlinked pages on Stack Exchange sites
- Where do the names of the Stack Overflow trilogy sites come from?
- How can I get Stack Exchange to send me to a conference?
- Do Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites have an app I can use?
- The Complete Rate-Limiting Guide
- Where can I find site community blogs?
- Which links and sites are handled specially (oneboxed) in chat? How do these oneboxes work?
- What shortened URLs are available through s.tk?
- What is the weekly newsletter? Who composes them?
- How can I report bugs with or request features for the Stack Exchange mobile apps?
- A site (or scraper) is copying content from Stack Exchange. What should I do?
- Is Stack Exchange / Stack Overflow available for private or internal use?
- What is a tag wiki? How do I write a good one?
- What events trigger an inbox notification?
- Do posts have to be in English on Stack Exchange?
Site-specific entries
Stack Overflow
- Should I send students to Stack Overflow?
- How do I ask and answer homework questions?
- What are the rules on using the Stack Overflow logo?
- Something in my web site or project doesn't work. Can I just paste a link to it?
- Why are the moderators being so strict with quality related flags recently?
Meta Stack Exchange
Other
External links
- Good Subjective, Bad Subjective
- Help Vampires
- Short, Self Contained, Correct (Compilable), Example
- Writing the Perfect Question by Jon Skeet
- How to Ask Questions the Smart Way
- What have you tried?
- Ten Simple Rules for Getting Help from Online Scientific Communities
Is your question not part of the FAQ?
First look at questions tagged faq-proposed to see if there is a question not in this index that might have the answer you seek. If you still can't find an answer, then see the following instructions for proposing an FAQ question.
How can a question be added to this FAQ?
Ask only the question, stated plainly and simply, in the question body. The answer goes in an answer.
Link back to this index. Paste this at the end of the question:
[Return to FAQ index](/q/7931)Tag as faq-proposed and support. When a post seems to have hit a mature state, it will have faq added by a moderator.
Flag for a moderator to mark community wiki. Any FAQ post not yet community wiki should be made into a community wiki.
After the post has the faq tag added to it, add a link in the above table of contents.