On every question page, including this one I'm writing on now, there is a relatively conspicuous link underneath the Post Your Question button, and it says

Answer your own question - share your knowledge, Q&A style

The link goes to a chirpy blog post that very much encourages people to ask and answer their own questions if they think it would help others:

To be crystal clear, it is not merely OK to ask and answer your own question, it is explicitly encouraged.

I recently took on a very well priced VPS package that came with Plesk preinstalled. I had no idea of the nightmare to ensue. For those not in the know, Plesk often behaves in unexpected and undocumented ways, and gets into places in your server you wouldn't expect it to be. Figuring out simple things, like how to access the MySQL CLI as root, can become an almost insurmountable task and certainly hampers productivity. The answer to the aforementioned problem can be found through significant forum trawling (made more difficult by very different behaviour depending on the Plesk version used) and is documented here: Access MySQL as root - a question I asked and answered.

The question was promptly (much more promptly than most of my questions are answered) closed by 6 users, one of whom left the following comment:

Thanks for telling us that. If you have an actual question feel free to post it.

A comment which I just as promptly marked as rude/offensive - it is certainly rude and runs contrary to the blog post I linked to above.

It is my understanding that this site exists, fundamentally, to increase the productivity of those who use the site. We come here for answers to our questions, and a lot of us give back by answering questions we know the answer to. There are fewer things on this green earth I give less of a toss about than my reputation - I use this site and have great respect for it and its users solely because my productivity as a home-schooled developer/admin producing valuable proprietary solutions for my clients would be significantly hampered if we all weren't here, doing what we do. It is the single best resource I know of to aid my productivity. End of story.

As I explained, finding the answer to this particular question was not easy, and certainly the solution was not in any way expected. It also has not been documented on this site. So I decided, and I didn't have to, to post this question and answer it to save future Plesk-ers the hassle of trawling Parallel's forums. I wanted to give back to the community. I had a small hope that perhaps one day a simple Google search for plesk access mysql as root would throw up this question first, and many minutes would be saved by many.

And yet I was immediately derided and the question was closed as 'not a real question' - a description which simply did not apply.

I have marked this as discussion because surely user behaviour going completely against the grain of site policy is an issue that we should clarify. I have also marked it as feature-request because currently the Answer your own question functionality is obviously not working as expected.

I would be grateful for some clarification from the wider community on these issues.