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This is moderately different to my title -- short story is that I'd like to be able to upvote questions/answers on StackOverflow, but am likely to only ever participate interactively on CrossValidated. I hope this is an OK topic for meta.

I'm a biostatistician -- so I use StackOverflow quite a lot for advice on various bits and pieces of programming, and would like to upvote the useful help I find. But I only have reputation in CrossValidated, since this is where I can usefully help people out with answers (I hope) -- I wouldn't be much use on StackOverflow. Also, pretty much every question I might want to ask on StackOverflow has already been answered (which is good for me, and why I'd like to be able to upvote things!)

Anyway, I'm wondering if people have ideas about how best to approach getting reputation on StackExchange, given that I'm very much a browser/end-user there (and don't want to jam things up with questions that have already been answered) -- I do often get useful help from answers that seem to be orphaned, with no upvotes.

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    $\begingroup$ I think once you have 100 rep, you can create a new account at other SE sites, & start out w/ 100 rep there, too. (Or maybe it's a different threshold, I don't quite remember, & I can't find it anywhere right now.) Unfortunately, I don't think your other accounts get a 'bump' when you cross that threshold here, given that your other accounts already exist, which does seem like a bit of a shame. You could request that as a new feature. $\endgroup$ – gung - Reinstate Monica♦ Dec 7 '12 at 3:09
  • $\begingroup$ @gung Thanks for the info! I'm getting close to 100 on CrossValidated -- so it's a shame I registered on StackOverflow first (for the reasons I gave above about giving rep where it was due!) $\endgroup$ – James Stanley Dec 7 '12 at 3:25
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    $\begingroup$ I believe you need 200 rep to earn the +100 bonus on other linked accounts. $\endgroup$ – chl Dec 7 '12 at 13:46
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    $\begingroup$ @gung Your accounts do get "bumped": that happened to me (long ago now!). $\endgroup$ – whuber♦ Dec 7 '12 at 14:33
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks all, very useful to know. $\endgroup$ – James Stanley Dec 9 '12 at 21:46
  • $\begingroup$ ...and I just hit 200 rep today on CV [cue celebratory cascade of streamers]. I got a +100 "Association bonus" rep on Cross-Validated as well as on Stack Overflow, which was a surprise. $\endgroup$ – James Stanley Jan 15 '13 at 0:30
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According to the FAQ to up-vote questions you have to have 15 reputation points. Easiest ways IMO are:

  • asking a good question (+5 per up-vote and +2 when you accept an answer)
  • editing questions (+2 until you reach some reputation threshold)
  • answering a question (always the chance that you come across some low-hanging fruit - or you could always look at old unanswered questions)

Long story short - ask one (or two) well structured question(s) about R or some other statistical package on SO and you will meet that small of threshold. I only marginally participate on SO as well, but I follow RSS feeds for the statistical package tags and will answer if I have a chance (and no one else already has). It is a good way to see stat programming in practice IMO.

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    $\begingroup$ +1, nice overview. As for the +2 for editing, I still get that @ ~13k for edits to things like tag wiki excerpts, but not for edits to posts. I think you get it for having an edit approved. You don't need approval for edits to CW posts after 100 rep, regular posts after 2k rep, and wikis after 20k rep (see priviledges). If your edit goes straight through (due to sufficient rep), you don't get +2, but if it's approved, you do. $\endgroup$ – gung - Reinstate Monica♦ Dec 7 '12 at 14:51
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks AndyW. the comments listed under my original question were the kind of answer I was looking for, but these are nice suggestions for getting things up and running. $\endgroup$ – James Stanley Dec 9 '12 at 21:48
  • $\begingroup$ @AndyW Lo and behold, it only took a couple of days until I had a question to ask on Stack Exchange, so I'm most of the way there to being able to upvote. [stackoverflow.com/questions/13830474/… $\endgroup$ – James Stanley Dec 12 '12 at 20:19
  • $\begingroup$ @JamesStanley - good to know! I didn't think it was much of a challenge to ask a good question - I have questions about R all the time (just don't get around to sufficiently searching them or I move on to other things) $\endgroup$ – Andy W Dec 12 '12 at 20:27

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