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The moderator who deleted the offending comments explained that only the whole Question (with all its Answers) could be locked to new Comments and Answers (at least that was my understanding), and I didn't want to see that happen. Locking my Answer would have been acceptable to me at the time (but I'm glad that didn't happen because someone else contributed another helpful Comment after the first round of Comment deletions).
@user unknown: I found your comments to be very angry in nature, and so I requested some assistance from a moderator to remove the entire chain of comments because I felt that 1., no matter what my response was you seemed to be determined in your position, and 2., overall it was not constructive nor helpful because it detracted from the answer I provided. I have been contributing a lot to this community, and this is really the first time I've experienced this type of hostilities here, so I'm glad that both of our comments got removed (upon my request).
That's correct. For further reading, RFC 1945, which defines the HTTP, specifies all the format of a URL and all its valid characters in sections 3.2.2 and 3.2.1 (on pages 15 and 14): rfc1945.openrfc.org
I believe that even the minor edits do contribute to the quality of the content on this web site. I had no idea that people were getting +2 points for minor edits -- where changing something minor like the first letter of the title to upper-case (which I do consider to be a valuable contribution with regard to overall site quality), I actually don't see any problem with no points being awarded for this (although, if a user is correcting a lot of these minor problems then perhaps points should still be awarded for every, say, 10 of these since it still does require time and effort).
Just in case anyone's wondering what @Mark Szymanski meant by "sock puppet," a definition that I wrote can be found here with a picture: lumbercartel.ca/glossary/sockpuppet.pl
Some people don't have lives (I'm serious), and are likely to notice mechanisms such as reward caps. Do we really want to lose such helpful people to other online communities that don't put a cap on the reward system? Where casinos may not want to lose gamblers, because it's beneficial to the revenue stream, Q&A systems may not want to lose helpful workaholics (or should we call them volunteeraholics, perhaps?), because it's beneficial to the information stream. I appreciate why, but I doubt it solves a perceived "obsessive users" problem.
When I first started using this system, I tried to answer a question. It was very frustrating for me because the system was rejecting an answer I had put quite a bit of time and effort into answering. So, out of frustration I posted my answer as a question, and then I found out that the question had been closed. I think there should also be a grace period after closing where a moderator gets to review answers before they appear to everyone so that good answer aren't lost (I think that sometimes an answer can still be useful for a seemingly bad question that was closed).
This question seems reasonable, to the point, and easy to understand. It also includes some helpful clarification immediately after the question. It certainly meets my quality standards.
@Pitto: In that case, pre-fixing the title with "Humour:" probably would have prevented [at least] some of the down votes that are appearing. Unfortunately there are a number of people who regularly ask questions about dark hacking in all sorts of forums, IRC channels, etc., only to be greeted with discouragement (for good reason), and so I'm assuming this may be one of the reasons your question has received some negative reactions. Dark Hacking not encouraged in online communities like SuperUser.com because the primary focus is on helping people solve problems.
I just hit +1 for that. I agree that this is helpful information, especially for people who run into the occasional program that depends on an environment variable being set a certain way (this is rare, but when it happens it usually effects those who are less technical).
