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I have found many times nice solutions on stackoverflow. But I read somewhere you need some reputation points to add a comment and also 15 points to upvote. So until then if I want to thank the expert whose answer helped me I have to post as an answer. I did that and somebody downvoted me saying it should be a comment and not answer. Check my comment here:

So what are my options? How do I post a thank you comment? Note: I couldn't find in faqs that I cannot comment until I have some reputation.

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  • Did you read meta.stackexchange.com/questions/72307/… ? You are not the only one asking this question ;)
    – VonC
    Commented Dec 15, 2010 at 16:19
  • Wow VonC...just a different of few hours between the posts...I was going to post this yest...glad you pointed that out to me. Thanks.
    – gbs
    Commented Dec 15, 2010 at 17:07
  • 2
    I think the FAQ is clear: “Amass enough reputation points and Stack Overflow will allow…: / 15 Vote up / 50 Leave comments† … / † you can always comment on your questions and answers, and any answers to questions you've asked, even with 1 rep” stackoverflow.com/faq#reputation-abilities
    – user141148
    Commented Dec 15, 2010 at 17:35
  • @Carlos Heuberger: Yes, you are right. FAQs has that listed and not sure how I missed that.
    – gbs
    Commented Dec 16, 2010 at 15:14
  • You can always accept the answer if it helped you with your question. 15 rep is a better "thank you" than a comment, and it gives you 2 rep points, which is not much, but helps. Two mediocre questions (with 1 upvote each) are enough to reach the 15 rep limit if you accept answers.
    – Pavel
    Commented Apr 6, 2013 at 10:34

4 Answers 4

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The answer is - don't do anything.

However, if you eventually continue using the site, remember to come back and upvote the answer. You can mark the question as "favorite question" (click the star), so that it will remain in the "favorite" tab of your user profile and you could easily find it in the future.

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  • thanks Oak, but doing nothing is not intuitive to everyone but the thread link provided by VonC has some interesting discussion. Oh yeah, thanks for the "favorite" tab. I am going to try that.
    – gbs
    Commented Dec 15, 2010 at 17:11
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"Thank you" comments are pointless noise. You can thank someone for answering your question by upvoting it. This is also why comments are restricted to being longer than 15 characters: precisely so that you cannot type "Thank you".

If you want to show your appreciation, that's fine. Wait until you get 15 reputation and then upvote the post in question. When you get more reputation you'll be able to comment, but be sure to contribute meaningfully with those comments. "Thank you" is not a meaningful contribution.

Later, when you've been with Stack Overflow for a long time, you'll come to see that this is a good way to handle things as when people come to visit Stack Overflow looking for answers they won't have to deal with meaningless comments inside the content they desire.

Even though you might think they can just ignore it, it does take real mental processing to determine if a comment is meaningful or not, and that slows people down which contributes to a negative mental image of Stack Overflow. We want to avoid that.

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  • he did put some tought in his thank you. there are answers there like "baapere bara khao" and just a plain thx with no down votes.
    – Andy
    Commented Dec 15, 2010 at 17:18
  • 26 years of Welbog,
    – gbs
    Commented Dec 15, 2010 at 17:23
  • @26 years of Welbog: Agree on that point, but then there needs to be an alternative. When you are trying to solve a problem for couple hours or days, not finding anything on web, all frustrated and but finally you find this post that solves your problem, one would definitely go ahead and type few words to thank that person. I am following the similar discussion where there are some thoughts floating how to handle this situation.
    – gbs
    Commented Dec 15, 2010 at 17:29
  • @Andy: thanks...now my post is back to 0.
    – gbs
    Commented Dec 15, 2010 at 17:36
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You need 15 rep to up-vote, and you need 50 rep to comment. For more information about the privileges you get on the site based on rep, see the privileges page which you can get to by clicking on your rep at the top of the page.

You can easily get this rep by posting 1 or 2 good questions and/or answers. For each up-vote on an answer, you get 10 rep. For each up-vote on a question, you'll get 5 rep. Post an answer that gets 2 up-votes, and boom! you can vote up answers that are helpful/useful.

Note that comments are not to just say thank-you. When you vote up a post, you are saying that it is helpful to you (hover over the vote up button and read the tool-tip). A comment that just says "thank you" is considered noise on these sites.

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  • By the way, was it ever considered to lower down the reputation required for commenting? I'm a Linux person, and since I do most of my activity on Unix&Linux forum, I can't expect to get out of the reputation trap on SO so soon. (currently on 45). The users who were first on SO have a great (and not so fair) advantage there IMHO, since to my knowledge the "Unix&Linux" sub-project did not exist back then. So they could even get their rep up with good Linux questions. I'm no longer allowed to do so, since Unix/Linux questions are considered off-topic on SO. (for a reason)...A Catch-22. Commented Sep 23, 2013 at 22:28
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If you don't have enough rep to vote (or, if you are an anonymous user) you can click

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or

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