Questions tagged [etiquette]
Questions regarding etiquette and proper behavior toward other users, both on and off Stack Overflow.
328 questions
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How do staff officially reconcile AI Assist with the reasons of the generative AI ban, as given in Stack Overflow policy?
I would like clarification on Stack Overflow's current stance (as of December 3rd, 2025) regarding the reliability of LLMs.
The ban on posting AI content, according to the SO Help Centre, is motivated ...
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My bad experience on the main site led to a bad experience on meta. Now what?
At some point in the recent past, I posted a question or answer on Stack Overflow, and then something happened that I didn't like. It may have been downvoted, closed (questions only), deleted or ...
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My answer doesn't work anymore due to an external tool becoming non-functional. What should I do?
Back in 2017 I posted an answer explaining how to navigate to the first commit of a GitHub repository using a bookmarklet. While the answer was helpful at the time, a user recently pointed out that ...
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What are the essential things to know before trying to use Stack Overflow?
It seems pretty clear that the tour doesn't explain the site very well in practice. I'm sure most people don't read it in the first place (the corresponding badge only seems to be awarded to about 13% ...
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A deleted answer written in Spanish fixed my issue. How do I credit it?
I recently asked the question How do I get the HTTP status code from UrlFetchApp.fetch() when it throws an error?. Someone responded with an answer written in Spanish, which was quickly deleted. I ...
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Is there a way to improve the answer if the author removes my changes and gives no explanation?
I received an answer to my question that seems to work but looks cryptic, and the author provides no explanation. I tried to figure it out on my own and added clarifying details while keeping the ...
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What kinds of questions are allowed on this site? [duplicate]
I am pretty new to forums and Q&A sites. I also have a whitelisted browser with very few sites for learning about C# and Windows Forms. What kinds of questions are allowed on this site? Do they ...
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When is it acceptable to delete a question?
Question inspired by this post as well as this one.
This applies to users with privileges to cast delete votes. In some cases, a post may be off-topic. Here's some situations:
It's blatantly off-...
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Should users encountering benign but irrelevant comments flag them as not needed?
I just flagged the following two comments from the question Is it worth bothering to align AVX-256 memory stores?;
Good question! I don't know the answer off the top of my head and
don't have the ...
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Are comments that merely correct terminology acceptable?
In C++, we say "data member" not "member variable". This led me to leave a comment underneath a helpful question which used the wrong term, along the lines of:
The right term is &...
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Discussion: New AI-generated content policy
Recently Stack Exchange announced a new network-wide policy regarding AI-generated content: What is the network policy regarding AI Generated content?
In short: moderators are prohibited from banning ...
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Do answers have to be "standalone"? Can an answer add useful information to another answer?
So recently a comment I put in an answer turned out to be useful (from another comment responded to me) so I turned it into an answer like this:
To add to the current answer, you need to ...
The ...
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When answering, should we upvote the question and the other (correct) answers? [duplicate]
When answering a question on Stack Overflow and the other Stack Exchange sites, I usually upvote both the question, as well as any other answers on the question that correct and working. My reasoning ...
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Should my edit be a separate answer?
I edited an answer here to make it more deadlock-safe:
Why can't I use the 'await' operator within the body of a lock statement?
Someone else has reverted my edit, saying that it changes the original ...
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Should users repeatedly redirect askers to an external site for official support?
I have noticed that many questions with a specific tag on Stack Overflow are receiving a lot of comments by the same user that contain a link to the official repository from that open source library. ...
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