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I haven't been active in the community for a while so maybe I've missed some important changes can you tell me why the question like this was down voted?

It was meant to ask for advice on best practices, and maybe suggest a library.

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Questions that ask for opinions are rarely considered to be constructive as they invite multiple answers - see the FAQ: "Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site". –  Oded Mar 23 '12 at 14:07
@Oded: Though I agree, "how can I split this string" could result in a substr call, a regex solution, some form of split, etc. Are those all considered nonconstructive? I think the question is very valid, and offers up (a/several) solution(s) to implement a "subtle" logging mechanism. –  Brad Christie Mar 23 '12 at 14:22
@BradChristie - The question (or rather, set of questions at the end of the post) is rather open ended (do you know of a better way to do X? What do you think about Y?). –  Oded Mar 23 '12 at 14:25
Thanks @Oded, I will keep in mind to make my question more to the point. Even though the question was unlikely to produce hard to accept answers, the amount of sub question at the end was definitely confusing. –  Piotr Czapla Mar 23 '12 at 15:07
Do you know any library / browser extension that implements such feature? don't we get enough spam without attracting it? –  Won't Mar 23 '12 at 18:39

2 Answers 2

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Apologies, but in looking at the question, that question isn't suitable for Stack Overflow. It's not constructive (please see the close reason for reasons why) in that it solicits a tremendous amount of opinion and I've closed it as such.

By your own words:


How can one quantify what the "best" advice is? How many different libraries are applicable to your problem? The Q&A format of Stack Exchange doesn't do well for this as it essentially boils down to "list these things out for me please" and we don't do lists very well.

Granted, there are older questions that are similar to this which are closed (or possibly still open), but they are not justification for questions of this nature on the site as it is today. These are shut down immediately.

That said, this is probably the best reason to explain why your question was downvoted, as people realize that it's not appropriate for the site and are marking it as such with their downvotes.

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Well +1 since you apologized –  Adam Rackis Mar 23 '12 at 15:01
@AdamRackis Shouldn't have to, but I figured it was the polite thing to do. Oh, and you're a meta rep-whore. Which makes it all the more sweeter when I overtake you in meta rep (and it will happen). Oh, notice how I waited for five minutes so your vote was locked in? Leave this game for the pros. =) –  casperOne Mar 23 '12 at 15:07
Hmmm, looks like somebody likes to use parenthesis where em-dashes are more appropriate. Maybe I should edit in some better grammar and rescind my vote... –  Adam Rackis Mar 23 '12 at 15:13
@AdamRackis Don't make me fabricate evidence of you being part of a vote ring or having sock puppets and then have your votes invalidated. Rollback war? –  casperOne Mar 23 '12 at 15:14
No, I don't think I'll get into a rollback war with a mod—especially one from The Bronx—I think I'll let you win this one... –  Adam Rackis Mar 23 '12 at 15:16
@AdamRackis Come on, I don't roll that hard... On second thought... Yeah, better to leave this one alone. Oh, and an accepted answer tick, that's +15, oh yeah. –  casperOne Mar 23 '12 at 15:17

People downvote for very strange reasons. On quite a few of my answers and/or questions, I have been downvoted once and then upvoted a few times. If you get one downvote, there's a chance that the question/answer is still good. Maybe you could post a comment asking why they downvoted. If you get downvoted many times, you should ask what is wrong, and try to "debug" it yourself.

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Many of us have seen that downvoting with a comment often leads to a long discussion with the poster claiming that the post really is very good. Most often not worth the trouble, so I generally either downvote or try to give some constructive comments. Hardly ever both. Note: I didn't downvote here. :-) –  Bo Persson Mar 23 '12 at 16:41

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