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How can questions and comments be asked or made about the following if I have too few reputation points?

How to install Ubuntu 14.04/16.04 64-bit with a dual-boot RAID 1 partition on an UEFI/GPT system?

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    Just ask a new question on the main site, including a link to the original question it references.
    – Byte Commander Mod
    Mar 13, 2018 at 13:37
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    It takes seconds to get the reputation needed to be able to do so.
    – Rinzwind
    Mar 13, 2018 at 13:56
  • OK, will do so ...
    – Pingumann
    Mar 13, 2018 at 14:12
  • Done. See: askubuntu.com/questions/1014589/…
    – Pingumann
    Mar 13, 2018 at 16:02

2 Answers 2

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Users with less than 50 reputation cannot comment anywhere except on their own questions and answers and answers to their questions.

In general, users can post questions and answers without having gained any reputation, but protected questions have a threshold of 10 reputation for posting answers. So, if you had 10 reputation points, you would be able to post an answer to the question. This is the only thing its protected status is preventing you from doing.

The purpose of question protection is to stop new users from posting answers that are not really answers. These non-answers could be spam, or they could be posts asking for help or clarification. I think you want to make a post in answer to this question of the latter kind - you want to ask for help with a related problem, I think?

Well, that's not how this site works. Answers to questions are meant to be solutions to the question. If you have a question yourself, you should ask a new question. If it's related to an existing question, you should provide a link to that question for context.

New users are only able to post up to two links, but if you need to post more, you can strip the http(s) prefix from URLs (or otherwise damage them in a recoverable way) and they can be repaired by users with the ability to edit.

If you want to post an answer (that is actually an answer, please) to a protected question, you can gain the requisite reputation by, for example

  • Posting a question that gains 2 upvotes (we love good questions)
  • Posting an answer that gains 1 upvote (we have lots of unanswered questions)
  • Suggesting 5 edits to posts that are approved by reviewers (we have lots of poorly formatted posts in need of editing)
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The only solution is to gain more reputation.

There is really only one acceptable way to gain reputation: post good questions and/or answers to the site, and get upvotes. If you create a new question or answer, and it's of decent quality and is a well written question or answer, you're bound to get upvotes (and getting the reputation to get past the protected posts is very easy and takes seconds if you post good questions and answers).

It takes almost no time to post a good question or answer and get the handful of upvotes necessary to gain the ability to post through protects. However, in this case, it may be a better idea to create a new question, detailing your specific questions about the original question, and provide a link back to the original question it references.

However, keep in mind the rules of question posts...

  • If the post is an exact duplicate question to the original, it's likely to get closed as a duplicate, so you'll have to give ample justification as to how it's different.

  • If the post is low quality or unreadable, it's likely to get closed as "unclear what you're asking", and possibly deleted.

  • If you are simply wanting to post additional comments on the original question or an answer on it, then you need to go and get reputation rather than post a whole new question just to make comments. (though just for comments, you have to get over 50 reputation points, which is again fairly trivial to do if you post good questions and/or answers).

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