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I'm an infrequent user of Ask Ubuntu, and have fallen into the same trap a few times now...

I see a question I know the answer to, take up to an hour to figure out what I did to solve the problem, compose an answer, post it, only to find out I didn't have enough 'reputation points' to answer the question in the first place.

I get why you do it, but any chance of making it clear that posting an answer is not available to users without the required reputation before they try to answer?

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  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Commented Aug 26, 2019 at 20:17
  • Short answer: almost always you don't need reputation to post answers, so there must be a misunderstanding or you're running into special cases (like protected questions).
    – Flimm
    Commented Aug 28, 2019 at 11:37
  • Stevin, I remember when I was at that reputation level. It can be very frustrating. But if you keep working at it, you will figure out how to work within the system. And it does lead to higher-quality questions/answers in the long run.
    – Josiah Yoder
    Commented Aug 28, 2019 at 21:56
  • Last word from me. My reason for asking question, which I'm not proud of, is complicated & debatable & borne of frustration. Main take-away for me is that, though I've learnt a lot, more attention should be paid to new users. If their answers are good or bad they should be marked accordingly at the time, not just ignored. Having to wait a year for a 'trigger' is disheartening, and risks losing people early on, like you nearly did me.
    – Stevin Jed
    Commented Aug 31, 2019 at 0:30

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So, I think from your comments you're mistaking "answers" for "comments" and vice versa.

Comments

To comment on any post that isn't your own, you need 50 reputation points; this is a restriction within the system itself. You add these with the "Add a comment" link underneath posts.

Answers

Answers are the big text box underneath questions where you can add answers. These must be answers to try and solve the OP's question or resolve the OP's question. These are NOT for comments, and not for "works for me" or "did you ever figure this out" or "me too" type posts.

If you were attempting to answer a post, then in this case, you were attempting to answer a protected question before you had sufficient reputation.

Protected questions give you a notice on the question itself that the question is protected. It looks like this:

enter image description here

However the answer you posted to the question initially was a comment and not really an answer, so it was deleted; you then needed to get to 50 rep for comments. (I converted your answer into a comment though, so it does show up as a comment)

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  • Thomas, you're right, it certainly wasn't a question.
    – Stevin Jed
    Commented Sep 29, 2019 at 2:41

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