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Comment by mjs | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, it's being edited constantly too! Someone just removed the "Hello" from the first line, which was part of what made it great...

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Stackoverflow is plagued by overzealous editing IMHO. I understand it's hard to balance it, but a question of mine recently got 3 downvotes and a close, to be reopened later! And now it even has 2 upvotes.

A guy answered it immediately, while some other peeps started whining about how it is not a proper question! I only wanted a quick fix, and I got it too, while the others nitpicked.

Hilarious.

I think it's great - it's not about solving your quick fix, it's about providing future value for googlers.

My quick fix question was entirely googlable.

Then where does one go for quick fixes?

I treat SO like a technically superior colleague - if I'm stuck with something and have exhausted my other options (documentation, examples, research, SO search), then I'll phrase my question clearly, showing my progress and what I'm stuck on. This makes me look good to my colleague, and enables him to understand where I'm coming from. A lot of the time by writing out the question in full I'll be able to solve it myself by getting my thoughts organised.

IRC, maybe.

For some reason that change was attributed to me when all I did was adding a comma after the »Hello« o.ô

EDIT: Ouch. I think those are SO's automatic attempts at making answers less chatty by removing salutations and thanks and the like. I'll rollback or try fixing it by doing evil Unicode things, then.

Boo. I read it with "Hello" and at that moment, I knew it will be a great read. Why someone remove it?

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