What's the difference between Answering a question and Commenting on a question?

[Clint]

This can trip people up and lower the signal-to-noise ratio for a given question

[Clint]

This is a comment and cannot be "voted" as the best "answer"

[Clint]

This is an answer. An administrator or owner can mark this answer as "best" for this question. When seeking clarification on a question or answer, be sure to use the comment feature. Reserve the Answer box for your best answer to the original question.

[nicholas_earl]

Thanks Clint, this is good to know but not entirely intuitive. I think part of what might be tripping people up is that when hovering over a question, a button appears for "Answer" but not for "Comment". When you click into a question, there's a big speech bubble next to one's name for "answer", but to comment you have to click a tiny text link under someone else's portrait.

[Clint]

Thanks for the feedback Nicholas! I'll let the Bloomfire team know. I suspect that it was an active decision to emphasize answers over comments but agree that it could be a bit more intuitive.