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I recently answered this question about crushing coffee beans. My final suggestion was to use a hammer, and I added a picture of MC Hammer for a little levity.

A user edited out both hammer pictures saying I should see the guidelines about staying on topic. I feel like the answer was totally on topic, and the edit is heavy-handed. Am I off base here? I don't feel like the site should be a super-dry textbook resource, and based on the upvotes the community seems to agree.

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    Agreed with SAJ14SAJ below. I think the pictures are perfectly appropriate, including the joke, but you could reduce their size. You can add an m or l to the end of imgur's file ID: http://i.stack.imgur.com/81EB0.jpg becomes http://i.stack.imgur.com/81EB0m.jpg.
    – jscs
    Dec 10, 2012 at 18:17
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    Thanks for the feedback--I didn't know I had the option of resizing them in place.
    – JoeFish
    Dec 10, 2012 at 18:40
  • It has come in handy for me many times over on SO when a questioner posts a 640x480 screenshot in their question at full size.
    – jscs
    Dec 10, 2012 at 19:32
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    Just post a notice at the bottom of your answer: "Can't touch this!"
    – Jeroen
    Dec 11, 2012 at 19:16

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Your answer is fine. Had the answer consisted solely of the MC Hammer picture, I would have fully supported the answer being deleted. But there's nothing wrong with having a sense of humor while answering the question - key part being the answering the question bit, which you did. Part of the issue here might be that the person who edited didn't think the hammer tool was a serious suggestion...though rudimentary, it is a possible solution to the OP's problem, but that might not have been obvious since it appeared at the end and right after a joke.

Not everyone agrees about issues of humor and tone, but that's why you, as the owner of the post, can roll back the edit if you'd like. Someone else might come along and delete the picture again, but if you feel strongly about it, you can direct them to this discussion so they can talk about it with you, or you can invite them to take it up with you in chat.

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  • Thanks Laura. I've never come across a situation like this before, so I wasn't sure what the rollback etiquette was.
    – JoeFish
    Dec 9, 2012 at 20:27
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    I wasn't the person to edit your post, but as a reader, the large images which are slow to load and consume unreasonable amounts of screen real estate and, making scrolling to find the actual information were counter-productive.
    – SAJ14SAJ
    Dec 10, 2012 at 15:34
  • @SAJ14SAJ Thanks, that's a good comment. I'll definitely keep that in mind for future posts.
    – JoeFish
    Dec 10, 2012 at 18:41
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    @JoeFish Thanks---not that images are bad. In this case, just, smaller :-)
    – SAJ14SAJ
    Dec 10, 2012 at 18:43
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    @SAJ14SAJ that's totally fair--in this forum the images are just for illustration, not to show details, so there's no reason for them to be huge. I've edited my post to make the images small and I'm just as happy with it.
    – JoeFish
    Dec 10, 2012 at 18:45
  • @JoeFish Cool... and still funny!
    – SAJ14SAJ
    Dec 10, 2012 at 18:57

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