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I plan to post many answers I worked out from professor-assigned problems in Dummit & Foote, an algebra textbook. Many are difficult, and I am not sure whether I am correct; this is the reason I want to post online. If I have time and perseverance to do this, there will be about 100 problems. It is my intention that it might be helpful to others to post my answer online, in order that it may be visible to Google.

I will not mechanically copy some solution manual; in fact there is no solution manual, as far as I can see. If there are people who agree with my answer by upvoting or comment, and I myself am also assured I am right, then I will choose my own solution. If another person posts a solution and points out that I am wrong, and I realize that I really am wrong, then of course I will choose his or her solution.

I have seen Can I answer my own questions, even if I knew the answer before asking? and What are limitations on self-answered questions?, but I think the situation is somewhat different.

First, it is remarked in the "Self answer" help article that it is okay to answer one's own question, but it suggests that the asker tick the checkbox to specify that it is a self-answered question, which I shall not do. I will, however, probably end up selecting my own answer. Will these be considered a kind of "junk behavior" and my account frozen or disabled, as the moderators might think I am kind of making Math.SE my personal repository, competing with really useful information for others?

Second, is it really okay to post many questions from the same book, or will the moderators suppose that I am affiliated with the book for advertisement, or that I should have done that in a class-related website?

This is not Math.SE-specific, since the same thing may be applied to Physics.SE, Cross Validated and so on.

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    Why do you want to emphasize you don't want to check the self-answer box? What is wrong with that? Commented Nov 27, 2016 at 18:15

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Self-answers are in principle absolutely fine. They have some common pitfalls that you must be careful not to fall into:

  • If this is a small site, be careful of flooding the site with lots of similar questions at once. Spread your questions out over a few days or even a few weeks.

  • Just being a self-answered question doesn't disqualify the question from all other quality and topicality requirements; make sure your questions are actually on-topic, not too broad, not opinion based, etc.

  • You also still need to follow all the normal quality requirements; don't just post a one-sentence badly formatted question with an equally bad answer. Take the time to make your posts high-quality.

You should also be aware of copyright. Quoting one question from a textbook is often okay under fair use, but unless you have permission, copying a significant number of questions from the book with the intention (or the appearance of the intention) of making the questions freely available without having to buy the book might annoy some lawyers.

And finally, don't blindly accept your own answer just because it's yours. You get no reputation from it, and your answer will not be pinned to the top. If you get other answers that are also good, consider accepting those instead.

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    Also worth noting that, on some sites, blog overflow answers and questions may be downvoted because some users think they look like rep-seeking behavior, particularly when many questions are asked/answered. This isn't necessarily a standard use of downvotes but it has been known to happen. A solution to this can be to wait a day or two before submitting an answer.
    – Catija
    Commented Nov 27, 2016 at 18:04
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    @Cat s/blog overflow/self-answered/
    – ArtOfCode
    Commented Nov 27, 2016 at 18:17

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