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As you can see I am fairly new to Stackoverflow, so my reputation is not high enough to be able to write comments (a limitation I am having hard time understanding the basis of). I have several times been in a situation where I want to answer a question but perhaps need some additional information from the person who posted it. My problem is that I cannot find any other way to communicate this in the “thread” other then posting an “answer” (please correct me if I am wrong). However, this usually means that my answer will get voted down (which I understand since it is not a real answer to the question) causing me to loose reputation and get ever further from the ability to post a comment.

So in short, what is the correct way to communicate something which should be a comment without been able to write one?

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  • Belongs on meta.stackoverflow.com
    – Paul R
    Commented Feb 8, 2011 at 10:33
  • Give the best answer you can, explaining it is incomplete due to the required information (state what that is in the question).
    – Oded
    Commented Feb 8, 2011 at 10:33
  • Thanx, I will move it there then.
    – pajevic
    Commented Feb 8, 2011 at 10:33
  • You now have enough rep for commenting.
    – Oded
    Commented Feb 8, 2011 at 10:36
  • Yeah, kinda funny that this question put me over the top :) But it was quite frustrating since this community really helped me with some programming issues and I wanted to give something back.
    – pajevic
    Commented Feb 8, 2011 at 10:38
  • See my answer to meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120454/…
    – Kate Gregory
    Commented Feb 9, 2012 at 23:05

1 Answer 1

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Well, at best you can just add an answer and add details in first line saying, "since I am not able to add comments, I need some additional information from the question". Give some possible answers from your side too.

Apart from this, you cannot do much since this is the new limitation in SO. Also the community will surely help you gain sufficient reputation in case you need them :)

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  • Yeah, I figured as much. I guess my fault is that I sort of thought in the classic forum-thread fashion where there is no distinction between answer and comment.
    – pajevic
    Commented Feb 8, 2011 at 10:48
  • 2
    I would just like to say that this is a silly restriction. If one can add an answer, why shouldn't one be able to add a comment to an answer, which is surely less noticable? (For some reason, I can add a comment here, on Meta Stack Overflow, having just created my ID here, but not yet on Stack Overflow.)
    – Teemu Leisti
    Commented Feb 26, 2011 at 18:45
  • @TeL, makes absolute sense!!
    – nawfal
    Commented May 6, 2011 at 14:27

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