I've done the self-answer thing a couple of times. Sometimes you just know that someone is going to run into the same problem, but you'll never see the question, and you can preempt it.

I think I've posted on StackOverflow/ServerFault three times in my life. If I've hit the point where I'm posting, I'm desperate and I've probably already spent 8+ hours scouring Google and trying everything I can think of.

If I do end up figuring out a solution, I definitely post it, and I'm glad that SO allows this, otherwise there would still be no answer to some of these questions online... One of these issues previously only turned up a single bash mailing list post from a decade ago with no resolution. Now searching for a few relevant search terms turns up my answer/solution in the top few results for all of them.

I don't care about imaginary internet points, I just figured I'd help the next guy out.

Some of these have been absolute God sends for me.

You have a cross between misinterpreting what something means, on obscure hardware, with a useless error message and you are normally stuck for days.

If I resolve my question before someone else in the community I always self answer to help the next guy.

More than once I've solved the problem by the time I am 80% of the way through formulating a question. As long as it's not something trivial I finish and post the answer immediately.

Not only is this allowed, it is encouraged.

Why would people use sock-puppets, I don't know. It seems that the SO team has special ways to detect voting frauds.

People use sock puppets to do this because although you're correct that it's with the SO guidelines, it feels a bit off, and not uncommon for it to get pushback from those who either don't agree with the guidelines or are not aware of them.

Also, while voting fraud is against the guidelines and actively countered, creating sock puppet accounts is not.

> Also, while voting fraud is against the guidelines and actively countered, creating sock puppet accounts is not.

You're right. For anyone interested here is the relevant post: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/57682/297429

Doesn't that say that "Answering your own questions with the other account(s)" is one of the things that a sock puppet account should not be used for?

Yes, but the parent comment said "creating sock puppet accounts", which is okay because there might be legitimate uses.

You use a sock-puppet to ask the question, and your real account to answer it. Then you can look smart.

Sometimes the act of writing out a question is enough to spur the right ideas to solve the problem. It's the same as whiteboarding or asking to use someone as a sounding board.

Also known as rubber duck debugging.

Still if it helps others this is cool interesting thing.