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Comment by Madcatm2 | Hacker News Reader

There are allot of uniformed assumptions being made here...

You don't know the quality of my questions and the degree of my contributions...and you never will. What most people do know is that Stack Overflow is a shit show in decline.

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It is not a "shit show on decline".

I am assuming this is your profile http://stackoverflow.com/users/6317210/madcatm2

Consider:

1) you have basic questions older than 6 months with correct answers you haven't marked as correct

2) you clearly show an ability to program, however ask questions that you should be able to debug yourself easily. I think this is the main issue. In your question about the return value of prompt, logging the response should show you it is clearly not the value "null".

I agree the initial reply may have been a bit harsh, but you must see the irony in saying

> There are allot of uniformed assumptions being made here...

followed by

> What most people do know is that Stack Overflow is a shit show in decline.

As somebody who contributes regularly to StackOverflow, I understand where you are coming from. That said, you have to understand that the people answering your questions are under no obligation to do so. If a question comes from a newcomer who has never yet contributed anything, why should I be motivated to put any effort into figuring out the problem and answering if the asker hasn't put in any effort either?

Have you learned about the browser developer tools? If you're using Chrome, you can press ctrl+shift+j to open them. On Firefox, it's ctrl+shift+k.

Then you can type in JavaScript expressions and see what they evaluate to. Even better than that, it has auto-complete functionality. I noticed you asked a question on SO about checking the length of a string (you named it str). If you type

    var str = "asdf";

and then

    str.

into the command line of the developer tools you can actually see all the properties of your string and tab to auto-complete to .length or whatever else you'd like to see. It's a really quick way of poking around and experimenting with things to see how they work. There are a lot of other features like debugging break points that you'll discover over time, too. Good luck!

Been there experienced that. I realized that they are stupid, but after a while from their point of view, they don't want redundant questions. But still my questions were closed, but those were narrowly different from existing ones. I used this trick. create additional 3 accounts in SOF (have them in each browser like Firefox, Safari, IE) and you post your questions through your main account in CHrome. And then upvote from 2nd, 3rd and 4th account from all other browsers, to keep the question alive.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

You realize _why_ the questions are being closed, and instead of cooperating with the people trying to keep StackOverflow clean, you just go around them. I never understood why StackOverflow would try to find correlations in user votes (voting fraud) until now.

I am disgusted.

I agree that OP is pretty unashamedly doing "bad" stuff. That said, if it was a jr dev who really had a different question that was closed, and had searched through SO and couldnt get help, I would be more apathetic/agree with the decision.

That said, SO should link the duplicate question to the answer question if it does exist. It would stop this behavior and be very useful

That's already mandatory, and has been for nearly 8 years.

Why feel something as strong as disgust for a person doing what he can to keep his question alive on a website on the internet?

If this person has found a reasonable way to keep his questions alive he should be applauded.

He has found a way to keep his question alive, at the known cost of generating what is likely going to be garbage for posterity (I am exaggerating here, but bottom line is that if a question is being closed, it probably is not useful to posterity).

He realizes his question is not good, yet instead of spending extra time to make it better, he votes on it from multiple accounts.

What does that have to do with you feeling disgust?

You, sir, are a bad person and should feel bad.

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