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This is similar to Updating Questions After Receiving Answers but deals with a different sort of updating.

I asked this question Incorporating new people into a critique group

Last night, the new person attended her first meeting and has decided to join the group. I'd like to give a brief update as to how the advice I got worked.

  • Should I do a horizontal line and then "update"?
  • Should I put it in the comments?
  • Should I allow the question to stand as is and not update it?
  • Should I answer my own question, with the experience I now have? (though it's slight)
  • Something else?

On a different SE, a questioner put an update in an answer, which was (rightly) deleted. I encouraged him to update the original question instead but, when he did, all or most of the update was edited out by mods. I don't know what the culture about updates is for Writing.

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I'm going to propose an alternative to what's been suggested already. We'll see how this goes.

What you are doing seems, in effect, to be to provide an answer to the question. It's not adding new material to the question; it's actually telling people how you dealt with the situation described in the question, and how that approach worked for you.

In my book, that should be posted as an answer.

If you don't want to earn reputation specifically from that answer — say, it's really just collecting points made in different answers which you found worked well for you in combination, adding little that hasn't already been said except to bring it together — then you can always mark the answer community wiki. You can and probably should credit other peoples' answers for specific points, if you took something specific from a given answer; CC-BY-SA only requires that you do it if you copy text verbatim, but even if you don't, it's a nice thing to do.

You won't gain reputation from accepting a self-answer, and an accepted self-answer floats purely based on community votes.

I'd say let's reserve the question space for the question, and keep answers in the answer section.

  • Question: So far we haven't done much in our group with the new person, so the update is quite brief. If I used the answer format for this, I would probably want to wait until our second meeting with her, and also ask her opinion on how the experience of joining an established group went (we're all still in the cautious but friendly stage). Maybe I''ve just answered my own question...waiting is probably better. – Cyn♦ Jan 25 at 21:53
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    @Cyn Yeah, in that case it sounds like a better approach might be to post a comment saying you've had a first meeting with them and plan to provide an update later, then post an actual answer when you've had a few sessions and maybe discussed her feelings and experiences in joining your group in some more depth. While that would be somewhat anecdotal, it could probably be turned into a quite worthwhile answer on its own, and it would certainly be based on experience. – a CVn Jan 25 at 22:10
  • That's a great idea, @aCVn. I will do that. – Cyn♦ Jan 25 at 23:01
  • I actually like this approach better than my own. Addresses the same points, reaches a better solution. – Galastel Jan 26 at 13:21
  • I agree with this approach as well. – V2Blast Jan 27 at 0:56
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I've only been here for the proverbial 5 minutes myself but personally I think

Should I do a horizontal line and then "update"?

is the best choice, it isn't really an answer, is distinct from the question and is more permanent than comments. And I really wish more SE questions got updates, if nothing else it closes the feedback loop and allows future visitors to see exactly how well the accepted answer played out further increasing it's value.

  • "horizontal line and then "update"" is the most common approach I see on other stacks, and it's the one I'd personally recommend. And I agree with your sentiment, there are so many questions where you're desperate to know what happened to the OP and whether things worked out for them, but they bounced immediately after posting the question and were never heard from again. If you're not gonna stick around to read the answers, it honestly makes me wonder what the point of asking the question was in the first place. – F1Krazy Jan 25 at 21:01
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Having been here a year, I didn't see that we have a culture for such matters. Maybe we should go ahead and create whatever culture seems best. :)

Now, in terms of what culture seems best, I would agree with @motosubatsu - a horizontal line and then "update" seems like the best answer. Comments get deleted, answering your own question doesn't seem fair to all the people who helped (unless you ended up doing something nobody had suggested), leaving the question as is means we don't get to find out what solution(s) really helped and how things worked out.

Maybe such an approach wouldn't work for other SEs, significantly bigger than ours, but this one is ours, and seems to me we get to decide what kind of culture we want here.

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