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Sorry for the wrong way of title used before.

All sub domains of stackexchange.com have a restriction of "minimum reputations required" for Chat Comment and Image uploading. When members have non-sufficient reputation,

  • In case of image, if my question does need an image to upload to ask the question specific to topic, and if it is happened to be my first question, or my nth question with below required reputation, I cannot get specific or perfect answers. Images especially of errors, warnings or snapshots of how does the application currently look like(if it is not be explained in words) are prominent among who face those errors before. So by uploading the image they can answer the specific answer. I find no logic in relating reputations with uploading images to ask an efficient question. It will make the new member of this community helpless.
  • In case of comment, some questions or answers need to be clarified slightly different than the questions or answers provided. In this case members with below than required reputations cannot ask a new question just to get small missing information from another answers. In most of the cases the questions asked slightly different than the existing questions will also be considered as duplicate by the forum moderators and members with high reputation. This will lead the member to loose the small reputation that he had before. By opening comment capability to all members irrespective of reputation will enable answerers to update the answer with more information and prevent duplication of questions.
  • When it comes to chat, some domains such as stack overflow restricted a reputation of 50!!. When there is no facility to send personal messages to the members of community, to contact the member for getting additional information about the comment or answer they have posted or to make them know that someone is trying to reach them, is only possible by leaving a msg through chat. for eg: In this post the member GrIsHu has commented to check out the answer provided by him. But there is neither answer posted not link have provided. Now I cannot comment(because of non-sufficient reputation), and I cannot leave a chat msg too(and its a dream to get 50 reputation immediately so that I can enter chat) finally I have no way to ask him the link of the answer he has posted. Even using chat we can get instant help without asking new question.

When members with very high reputation(>50K) use comment to offend each other(In many posts posted on sub domains of stack exchange that I don't like to disclose), new members with <50 reputation who are in hurry or in need of immediate help can't get simple clarifications on answers with high up votes or the required answer in time.

I personally not getting the logic behind restricting newbies to upload an image, use comment for either for clarification or suggestion and restriction on chat to get instant help or use as a means of contacting a particular member.

What is the genuine reason behind these restrictions?

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  • Members whoever down vote please let me know the reason so that I could improve my question.
    – learner
    Oct 25, 2014 at 4:43
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    I wasn't a down-voter, but I'd heavily suggest adjusting your question to read less like a complaint. Your question isn't a bad one, but you've phrased it as more of a rant against the system then an honest desire to understand. Calling the site you're asking about "annoying" isn't going to get you many fans, especially when you ask on somewhere like MSE, where most of the users are by nature fans of Stack Exchange.
    – Matthew Haugen
    Oct 25, 2014 at 5:12
  • @MatthewHaugen thank you for your suggestion.
    – learner
    Oct 25, 2014 at 8:49
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    Sorry to all stackexchange users, for framing the title in an offensive way earlier.
    – learner
    Oct 25, 2014 at 8:50
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    Your last comment made I reversed my downvote to an upvote. Thanks for being not that regular SE complainer who thinks he knows all.
    – Patrick Hofman
    Oct 25, 2014 at 9:47
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    Awesome, looks better now. Just for future reference, there are definitely things on the Stack Exchange network that could stand for some improvement (that's a big part of why we even have a meta), but it's good to phrase questions as you do now: why do we do it this way? If the general response is "huh, I have no idea!" or if you're unsatisfied with the response, then it's time to say "I just asked (this question) and I understand we do (this) because of (reason), but I think (opposing reason), so I suggest we change it to (alternative)."
    – Matthew Haugen
    Oct 25, 2014 at 10:43
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    That will make it sound a lot less like a rant. You may get up- or down-votes, but then they'll be representative of whether people agree with you, more than whether they liked your question. So again, no worries on this one, it looks like your edits are being received positively, and with good reason. But in the future, don't be shy to ask questions and question things, but make sure you do it with an inquisitive tone, rather than an accusatory one. It's just more productive, and that's good for everyone.
    – Matthew Haugen
    Oct 25, 2014 at 10:45

1 Answer 1

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A quick preface: at the two hundred rep point level on a single site for the first time, you're immediately rewarded one hundred rep points on every other site. So you just have to hit that on one, and suddenly you're able to do everything we're talking about. I know two hundred rep points isn't nothing, but it's definitely doable. The only real action you might normally want to perform that you can't with that boost, is down-voting.

Actually, I'm noticing now, you're at 180 or so on AU. You just need an answer to get two up-votes and none of this will be relevant to you personally again.

Comments

If we allowed all users to write comments, that would likely read to a lot of people saying things like

Thanks!

And that's not what comments are for. Thus, we limit the people who can do that to only those which we trust, and the best way to quantify trust on the Stack Exchange network is through reputation.

On top of that, a simple and annoying reason for all of these is that they avoid spam. It's easier to catch a spam question or answer than something minor in a comment, and chances of spamming decrease with the reputation of a user.

Low-rep users might also jump in comments and say offensive things, so it's nice to avoid that.

Chat

I'm a little less certain on this one, but in general I suspect it's a similar reason. The more we can avoid noise in the chat rooms, the better. If everyone in the world decided to jump onto chat and start asking their questions, that would lead to tons and tons of useless noise, and nobody would have any fun or get any answers.

Not to mention, it would just mean more infrastructure was necessary. That's not the biggest reason, I suspect, but by limiting by reputation, we jump down from millions and millions of potential users to a significantly lower number. So the service can be offered, knowing full well that the only users are already devoted to the site.

As Infinite Recursion kindly brought up below, another big reason for not allowing super new users on chat is that we want to avoid offensive avatars which have been an issue in the past.

Image Uploading

I can think of two main reasons for this. The simplest is, of course, that new users or bots who post spam aren't able to post any pornographic or otherwise harmful content. On top of that, we want to avoid people who screenshot a block of code and paste it into their question, because that's just awful for everyone.

Images also have the matter of infrastructure. If everyone could upload images without any limitations, that could lead to a lot more load on imgur, which SE already pays for. So by limiting it only to somewhat-trusted users, we can filter out a lot of that.

Just a little fun fact to back up a bit of what I've said here, server load-wise, I just popped over to the SE advertising page, and it looks like Stack Overflow (which, while being the largest, note is only one of 129 sites in the network) gets 41,320,652 unique visitors per month, and 414,488,576 page views. So it's understandable why we don't want every person coming on to be able to write comments or jump right into chat, it's better to let those act as privileges and incentive for people to post great content.

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  • As you are less certain about chat, here is the reason: to prevent noise and disruption from offensive users. We often get disruption in chat rooms, here is the post about the recent invasion of nazi avatars in chat
    – Infinite Recursion
    Oct 25, 2014 at 5:16
  • @InfiniteRecursion Cool, that's part of what I was figuring. Thanks for the link.
    – Matthew Haugen
    Oct 25, 2014 at 5:18
  • The restriction on image upload exists only on a few sites.
    – user259867
    Oct 25, 2014 at 5:32
  • These days, just about every question I ask goes in a different site... Seriously, the distinctions between SF, AU, and SO are splitting hairs. Or maybe it just seems that way when your job is automating configuration of ubuntu servers...
    – Jacklynn
    Oct 26, 2014 at 0:28

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