I use a lot of stack overflow for what I assume are common questions, but every now and then I’ll stumble across an answer that I know is wrong, but it’s voted up. These answers were likely correct when they were written 12 years or so ago, but new technologies and methods exist today that did not back then. I would like to comment on these to explain why these answers, while they may have been correct years ago, are no longer correct now. The problem is I don’t have 50 “reputation” to do so, despite having, what I believe to be, insight of value to provide for anyone else stumbling upon the same issues that I have.

As a single example, I was recently researching how to simulate queries in MySQL. I wasn’t sure if this was something inherent to MySQL or if PHPMyAdmin just happens to have this functionality built in. I came across this answer:

Simulate MySQL queries (asked 12 years ago, modified 5 months ago)

I immediately knew this to be incorrect because I know that implicit commits are a thing when dealing with statements containing data definition language statements, regardless of transactional state or autocommit setting. Since I don’t have 50 reputation, I cannot relay this information.

With that being said, what’s the proper way to improve my reputation on stackoverflow the right way?