Frequently Asked Questions
What kind of questions can I ask here?
Any Kynetx related questions, of course! As long as your question is:- detailed and specific
- written clearly and simply
- of interest to at least one other person somewhere, anywhere
Then it is welcome here. No question is too trivial or too "newbie". Oh yes, and it should be about Kynetx.
Be sure to check out our local guide on what you can do to get better answers to your questions
Please look around to see if your question has already been asked (and maybe even answered!) before you ask. If you end up asking a question that has been asked before, that is OK and deliberately allowed. Other users will hopefully edit in links to related or similar questions to help future visitors find their way.
It's also perfectly fine to ask and answer your own question, but pretend you're on Jeopardy: phrase it in the form of a question.
What kind of questions should I not ask here?
Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered!
Be nice.
Treat others with the same respect you'd want them to treat you. We're all here to learn together. Be tolerant of others who may not know everything you know. Bring your sense of humor.
Be honest.
Above all, be honest. If you see misinformation, vote it down. Insert comments indicating what, specifically, is wrong. Even better — edit and improve the information! Provide stronger, faster, superior answers of your own!
Do I have to log in or create an account?
Nope. You can answer and ask questions to your heart's content as an anonymous user, much like Wikipedia. However, there are some things you won't be able to do on the site without registering. But it's easy to register if you want to. All you need is an account.
What is reputation?
Reputation is completely optional. Normal use of Kynetx Developer Exchange — that is, asking and answering questions — does not require any reputation whatsoever.
Remember, this site is run by you! If you want to help us run the site, you'll need reputation first. Reputation is a (very) rough measurement of how much the Kynetx community trusts you. Reputation is never given, it is earned by convincing other users that you know what you're talking about.
Here's how it works: if you post a good question or helpful answer, it will be voted up by your peers: you gain 10 reputation points. If you post something that's off topic or incorrect, it will be voted down: you lose 2 reputation points. You can earn up to 200 reputation points per day, but no more. (Note that votes for any posts marked "community wiki" do not generate reputation.) Amass enough reputation points and the site will allow you to go beyond simply asking and answering questions:
| 15 | Vote up |
| 15 | Flag offensive |
| 50 | Leave comments |
| 100 | Vote down (costs 1 rep), edit community wiki posts |
| 200 | Reduced advertising |
| 250 | Vote to close or reopen your questions, create new tags |
| 500 | Retag questions |
| 2000 | Edit other people's posts |
| 3000 | Vote to close or reopen any questions |
| 10000 | Delete closed questions, access to moderation tools |
At the high end of this reputation spectrum there is little difference between users with high reputation and moderators. That is very much intentional. We don't run the site. The community does.
What if I don't get a good answer?
In order to get good answers, you have to put some effort into the question. Edit your question to provide status and progress updates. Document your own continued efforts to answer your question. This will naturally bump your question and get more people interested in it.
If, after two days, you still don't have an answer you like, you can offer a bounty. Slice off a bit of your own hard-earned reputation -- anywhere from 50 to 500 -- and attach it to the question as a bounty. We'll even throw in 50 reputation to sweeten the deal. The bountied question will appear with a special icon in all question lists, and it will also be visible on the home page Featured tab.
Once initiated, the bounty period lasts seven days. If you mark an accepted answer, your bounty is awarded to the answerer (do note that accepted bounty answers are permanent and cannot be changed). If you do not accept an answer in seven days, the top voted answer will automatically become the accepted answer, and half your bounty will be awarded to that answer. You will always give up the amount of reputation specified in the bounty, so if you start a bounty, be sure to follow up and accept the best answer!
Of course, bounty awards, like all accepted answers, are immune to the daily reputation cap and community wiki mode.
Other people can edit my stuff?!
Like Wikipedia, this site is collaboratively edited. If you are not comfortable with the idea of your questions and answers being edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you.
Tips and Tricks
- View recent responses to your posts. The little envelope next to your name at the top of the page lights up when people have posted new answers to your questions or have commented on your posts. Click the envelope to see the most recent responses to your posts and the most recent places you've gained/lost reputation.
- Accepting answers. In addition to voting posts up and down, you can accept answers to your own questions. To do this, just click the check mark that appears to the left of the answer you'd like to accept (this check mark will only appear if you asked the original question). This gives the person who answered your question 15 reputation points and gives you 2 reputation points. You can "unaccept" the answer by clicking the check mark again.
- Interesting/Ignored Tags. Add a tag to your "Interested Tags" list (on the home page or in the "prefs" tab in your user page) to visually highlight questions that use that tag. Add a tag to your "Ignored Tags" list to grey out questions with that tag.
- Edit histories. You can tell that a post has been edited because it says something like "edited 8 hours ago" or "edited yesterday" at the bottom. If you click on "8 hours ago" (resp. "yesterday"), you can see the full edit history of the post.
- View Markdown source. Suppose you're really curious how somebody typeset something in a question or answer (I think I'm not the only one this happens to). If the post has been edited, you can view the edit history (see Tip 4) and click the "view source" link above a revision. This will show you exactly what the person typed in order to get the result you see. If the post has not been edited, then it's a little trickier to view the edit history. First you have to find the number of the post. If the post is a question, then it has a URL like http://devex.kynetx.com/questions/number/blah-foo-bar. If the post is an answer, you can click the "link" link at the bottom of the answer to get a URL like http://devex.kynetx.com/questions/123/blah-foo-bar/number#number (the two numbers will be the same). Once you know the number of the post, you can get to the edit history by going to the URL http://devex.kynetx.com/revisions/number/list.
- Bookmark/Favorite a question. Suppose you really like a question or you really want to be able to find it easily later. You can add it to your favorite questions list by clicking the little star next to the question. Click the star again to "unfavorite" it. To see a list of your favorite questions, go to the "favorites" tab on your user page.
- Use reserved characters in URLs. Sometimes your links will behave strangely in comments because they contain a reserved character. For example, the text
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castelnuovo–Mumford_regularity
ends up linking to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castelnuovo
To fix this, you have to percent encode the troublesome character. In this case, you'd type
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castelnuovo%2DMumford_regularity
to get a good link. Here's a table (taken from Wikipedia) of reserved characters. I'll add/remove columns as I discover which characters do/don't cause trouble.
* $ [ ] – (space) %2A %24 %5B %5D %2D %20 - Follow up on your recent comments. It's easy to follow up when somebody replies to one of your posts (see tip #1), but you might find yourself saying, "I left a comment that I really meant to check up on later, but I can't remember where I left it." In that case, try clicking the "recent" tab on your user page. It will show you a list of all the comments you left in reverse chronological order, along with links to the posts on which you left them. It also shows you when you asked, answered, edited, or accepted an answer.
- RSS feeds. Kynetx DevEx has feeds for recent questions, questions within a given tag, activity on a single question, activity of a given user, and probably some others I don't know about. To find the link for the feed, just scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the
(e.g. to get the feed for a given user's activity, scroll to the bottom of that users profile page; to get the feed for recent questions, scroll down to the bottom of the home page). - Escape Markdown special characters. Characters like * and _ have special meaning in Markdown (the markup language used by the WMD editor). You can escape them with a backslash. For example, write \*test\* to get "*test*" rather than "test". You can also escape these characters in comments.
- Use boolean operators on tags. You will notice that you can see all questions with a given tag by clicking on the tag, and maybe even that you can combine tags to see questions that use both (by clicking on the "related tags"), but you can also search for questions that use one tag OR another or search for questions that use one tag, but NOT another. For example, the URL http://devex.kynetex.com/tagged/versioning or appbuilder will show you a list of questions that are tagged ([versioning] OR ([appbuilder] but NOT [appbuilder-versioning]). NOT (denoted by by prefixing a "-") binds tighter than AND (denoted by a space) binds tighter than OR (denoted by the word "or"). See this Stack Overflow blog post for more.