Timeline for Answers in comments are increasingly more common
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 21, 2021 at 13:28 | comment | added | Will Sawin | @DavidRoberts I'm sure there's no way anyone who seemingly left the site could have returned to MO using a series of pseudonymous accounts, but, if they did, they might choose to sometimes answer in the comments and sometimes post a regular answer, making them less of a relevant example. | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 22:06 | comment | added | David Roberts Mod | he has not been active here since ten years, it seems ..... wellllll. ;-) | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 19:21 | comment | added | Federico Poloni | @HarryGindi Continuing the analogy, when we see someone littering we don't normally call the police for 'coercive action', but we can still do something: point out their wrong behaviour and let peer pressure work against them, for instance. (Incidentally, are there still users that answer only in comments as a personal rule? The thread linked above mentions one, but he has not been active here since ten years, it seems). | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 18:15 | comment | added | Harry Gindi | @FedericoPoloni Short of coercive action by the moderators (which I certainly don't want), I don't see a way out of this. There are some users who make extremely helpful and useful contributions to this site who, frankly, flout the rules about answering questions in comments. If the choice is between cleaning up after these people or threatening them with suspensions, I prefer that we just clean up after them. It's not that much work. The disincentive to this behavior is actually the reputation system, and it works probably 95% of the time. | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 15:43 | comment | added | Federico Poloni | Thanks @DavidRoberts; this makes sense. Anyhow, what I don't like about this proposed solution is that it requires additional work from the community (copypasting comments with links, formatting and formulas into an answer is not immediate) and normalizes the misuse of the comment system without attempting to change it. It is like saying "if you see someone littering our common house, you can pick up their trash yourself and put it in the trashcan", without addressing the problem of people that litter in the first place. | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 10:55 | comment | added | David Roberts Mod | @FedericoPoloni it's not about re-licensing old content here, but the license one can put on the copied work, since it is meant to be "Share-Alike". CC seem to claim that you don't need to use the exact same version of the license, but can use an updated version of the CC-By-SA license, as long as the original was 2.x or above. The controversy was that SE was re-licensing the original works. | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 10:44 | comment | added | Federico Poloni | @DavidRoberts IANAL either, but this highly upvoted meta.se post states (with explicit reference to the CC update guidelines) that it is not permitted to unilaterally relicense content from CC-BY-SA 3.0 to CC-BY-SA 4.0, though. Anyhow, these are just edge cases (copying a very old comment). | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 9:14 | comment | added | David Roberts Mod | Saying who wrote it and linking to their comment means you have satisfied the conditions (IANAL, maybe modulo minor formatting issues of referencing) of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Note that CC-By-SA has been the license for a while, just that the version was updated twice. CC themselves say the licenses v2.x and later are forward compatible | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 8:53 | history | edited | Harry Gindi | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 190 characters in body
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| Jan 20, 2021 at 8:50 | comment | added | Harry Gindi | @FedericoPoloni Nobody is going to sue over this. There's not really any way that it could be a matter of monetary damage anyway, so the worst thing that could possibly happen is we have to delete the answer or just rephrase it. You can't copyright the idea of an answer, just the literal text. | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 8:48 | comment | added | Federico Poloni | Note that there are edge cases in which this is illegal, I believe, because it changes the CC version that applies to its content. EDIT: ...and there was quite some backlash when SE tried to relicense stuff. | |
| Jan 20, 2021 at 8:46 | history | answered | Harry Gindi | CC BY-SA 4.0 |