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I have marked a thread as answered many times, but on a few of them, I later asked a follow up comment. Do the answers not get notified when the thread is marked answered? Or is common just to ignore follow up questions once you answer has been accepted?

The reason I ask is because I have never had my follow up responded to after I accept an answer.

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  • 1
    People do get notified when you post a comment to their answer, regardless of whether the answer has been accepted or not. It's hard to tell why you didn't get a reply without a link to a concrete question, but in general, follow-up questions should be posted as new questions, not as comments to existing answers (of course, this depends strongly on how far reaching the question is. If it's just a minor clarification, a comment is okay and will usually get answered, but if it leads into a whole new direction, opening a new question is usually better)
    – Jake
    Commented Jun 14, 2013 at 4:03
  • @Jake by follow up, I mean in regards to the current question not something new.
    – dustin
    Commented Jun 14, 2013 at 4:06
  • Yes, of course, but there's a difference between "Can I also change the colour to red?" (most likely that's very easy) and "Okay, how would I adapt this approach to work for a bibliography entry created with biber?" (that's probably opening up a whole new can of worms). Again, this is just idle speculation without a link to a concrete question.
    – Jake
    Commented Jun 14, 2013 at 4:09

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This varies and depends on a number of circumstances. I'll reflect on a couple from personal experience:

  • You're too slow to respond.

    The OP doesn't wait long enough for you to respond and asks a new follow-up question before you can get around smoothing out anything further to help.

  • You forget.

    This happens, believe it or not. Some days/weeks are more busy that others and you don't get to visit the site that often. Suddenly a week goes by and what you planned to do in terms of updating a solution has fallen by the wayside.

    Perhaps a comment reminder could be issued in such an instance. You could also delete your non-response comment and re-issue it (with the appropriate @<user> notification, if necessary).

  • You read the comment and don't know how to solve the "updated question".

    Uggghh. Yes, we're not all part of the !!/battle-clan and therefore do not possess infinite guru-like LaTeX-foo...

  • You feel that the "updated question" is almost completely irrelevant to the original post, making an updated solution seem out-of-place.

    While this might seem bizarre from the OP's perspective. After all, they are the one looking for an answer to their problem(s), and may not necessarily care about the longevity of their question nor it's place on the network. However, sometimes a comment-request might require a completely different working around the existing solution. Most notably such comment-questions occur when the OP doesn't include full MWEs. It is usually followed by requests to avoid certain packages or propose alternate environments that support their needs...

Whatever it may be, consider the non-response to be human. Please try again later.

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