Community FAQ
For sites in the Stack Exchange 2.0 network
To see a list of commonly used words and phrases, see the glossary.
Asking questions
- How do I write a good title?
- How can I get answers fast?
- Is there a limit on how many questions I can ask?
- How should we deal with Google questions?
- Should I send students to Stack Overflow?
- How to ask and answer homework questions?
- What is the XY problem?
- How do I get attention for old, unanswered questions?
- What can I do when getting "Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account"?
- What can I do when getting “It 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?
- Something on my web site doesn't work. Can I just paste a link to it?
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 those where I knew the answer before asking?
Accepting answers
Working with posts
- What does it mean when a question is...
- How do you reopen a closed question?
- How do favorite questions work?
- What are "Community Wiki" posts?
- Who is the Community user?
- How does the bounty system work?
- What is a historical lock, and what is it used for?
- Why does the "Unanswered Questions" tab show questions that have answers?
- Formatting Sandbox
- What is the difference between "hot" and "active" questions?
- View or search for unanswered questions with a certain tag
Comments
- How do comments work?
- How do comment @replies work?
- How do I view my recent replies?
- Is it acceptable to write a thank you in a comment?
Etiquette
- Is English required on Stack Overflow?
- Are taglines & signatures disallowed?
- Are expletives 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 closing your own questions
- Answer or comment: what's the etiquette?
Promotion
- How can I link to an external resource in a community-friendly way?
- Limits for self-promotion in answers
- How does the spam flag 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?
Tagging
- How do I search for questions with specific tags?
- How do I correctly tag my questions?
- What happens to "zombie" tags?
- What are tag synonyms? How do they work?
- What is meant by tag follower versus the "x number" that appears after a tag name?
- Stack Overflow tag filtering
- Why do we tag questions?
- What do icons on the tags mean?
- What do "favorite tags" and "ignored tags" do?
Reputation, badges, and voting
- How does "Reputation" work?
- How do "badges" work?
- Why are badges sometimes not awarded?
- How long does it take for badges to be awarded? How are they generated?
- List of all badges with full descriptions
- What are tag badges? How do they work?
- Are there any voting limits?
- When should I vote?
- How do comment voting and flagging work?
- How do I audit my reputation?
- Why did I receive a message saying I have been granted a privilege, yet I don't have enough reputation?
- What are the limits and restrictions for new users?
- The global reputation recalc of March 2010
- 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?
- Reputation requirements compared
Moderation
- Who are the diamond moderators, and what is their role?
- What are the moderation tools available to high-reputation users?
- Flagging a post for moderator review
- How does the Offensive Flag 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"?
- How should duplicate questions be handled?
- Is it worthwhile to migrate questions that already have accepted answers?
- How to best handle the "Possible vandalism of own posts" flag?
- Should moderators enforce NDAs for software vendors?
- How does the spam flag work?
- I think I found some user accounts that should be merged; what do I do?
- How do you challenge the closing of one of your questions?
- Closing/Migrating question instructions/guidance
- Who are the Community Managers, and what do they do?
- What are the review queues?
- Why was I told, "Congratulations, this was only a test" when reviewing?
- Why are the moderators being so strict with quality related flags recently?
Searching and RSS feeds
- How do I search for questions with specific tags?
- How do I make search return results that actually contain all the search terms?
- RSS feed for responses to your posts
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 OpenID/registered)
- I Can't Log In With My OpenID -- Troubleshooting Tips
- Where can I get an OpenID?
- How do I change my OpenID provider(s)?
- How do I remove an OpenID or login?
- 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?
- How can I delete my account?
- How do I contact other users?
- How can I log in to my Stack Exchange account if my current account provider is blocked?
Other
- Where can I find additional help?
- 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 Data Explorer
- What third-party tools are there for the trilogy websites?
- Who owns the content I post?
- What makes a winning site proposal?
- What can cause my question to be bumped?
- How do I remove my name from a post, in accordance with CC:WIKI?
- 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
Site-specific entries
- What is the proper way to approach SO as someone totally new to programming?
- How does Meta Stack Overflow work?
- Choosing between Stack Overflow and Programmers Stack Exchange
- Where can I ask questions that don't fit or are off-topic for Stack Overflow?
- What do the colors on Stack Overflow mean?
- What are the rules on using the Stack Overflow logo?
- The Many Memes of Meta
External links
- Good Subjective, Bad Subjective
- Help Vampires
- Short, Self Contained, Correct (Compilable), Example
- How to Ask 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 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.
