Modnote: The above is a great example of an almost random bare link we don’t encourage or want to see on the Straight Dope. Please, everyone, don’t do this in other threads.
If you do it often, it will be noticed and reported I’m sure which will most likely lead to warnings.
I thought I was being obvious. Sorry. (and thank you)
I think you were demonstrating what not to do. I hope so at least. 
I posted the brief explanation above because I think it’s a cool concept—a unique identifier that always takes you to the source and never changes. You see DOIs everywhere in scholarly and professional literature these days, and I thought it would be interesting for folks here to know about them.
Imagine my surprise when I learn that the guy complaining about it doesn’t care what it means, and the guy who originally used it doesn’t care either. What a world! 
I don’t want to press this too much especially because I’m just dumb enough that I could be missing something obvious here but I do want to respond to your post.
I was having some formatting issues and I couldn’t get your post to appear just as it originally looked so I just went with the header in my previous post. Sorry.
I still can’t get it to look just right, but here, more or less, is what I intended in my previous post: the GQ question title followed by your response:
Why did all the McDonaldland characters disappear
So there’s a question in the General Questions forum:
“Why did all the McDonaldland characters disappear?”
You responded with only a link. That’s already bad form, IMO, but in this case it was even less helpful than usual because neither the link nor the infobox capsule had anything approaching an answer for the OP.
What does plagiarizing Pufnstuf or murky origins of McD-Land characters have to do with the question?
And if there was an answer somewhere in your link, why in the world didn’t you quote it and share it with that thread? Especially as this was just the sixth post in a GQ thread.
I believe that links should almost always be used only for support, further elucidation, or illustration of your thesis. They should not be your entire contribution to a thread. them.
I’m never impressed by a bare link as a post. It doesn’t matter whether that link is to Cecil or God or my dead uncle.
OK, really I do care what it means because I’m naturally curious. 
Perhaps I should have said: "Its actual definition is not the point here–after all I could just Google it–I was only pointing out that poster’s faux pas.
A rule that was not enforced in the thread in question. Perhaps it wasn’t reported.
No, the thread in question had description in both the subject line and the post.
When I made the post, I was doing it from my phone, like I do 99% of the time lately. On the phone there is no live preview panel like on the desktop. I posted assuming that it would give the normal summary/opening passage box. After I posted I saw that it didn’t, concidered trying to give a meaningful edit during the edit window or make a second post with supplemental information, then decided to let it go. (Until asked for that info by a poster.)
If it had gone “normally” with the thread title, the introductory sentence, and a box with the opening part of the article? I absolutely 100% would have been happy with and have considered it a perfectly cromulent post to introduce the topic. I don’t think people should need to be spoon-fed prompts on exactly how and if they should find the topic worthy of discussion, and I find the people who go out of their way to stifle posts that don’t fit their personal posting style or have a topic that interests them is one of the most obstinate, hostile, counterproductive, Okay Boomerish things this site does to itself.
Not only not flagged but the OP came back and expanded on his Op pretty quickly. 2 posts later. So even if it was flagged, it would have been fine in this case.
Did you miss that only 2 posts later? If I sound a little grumpy, its because I feel like you were just playing some stupid gotcha game and wasting my time.
Who says that the goal has to be to reach as many people as possible? Can’t the goal be “I think some people here are interested in this topic–they will know who they are and who they aren’t.”
For instance if a news item comes up that a non-avian dinosaur fossil has been discovered well into the tertiary, the topic line tells that a non-avian dinosaur fossil has been discovered well into the tertiary, and the preview box has a few sentences from the article that describe the finding of the tertiary dinosaur fossil, shouldn’t that be enough for you to know if that is a topic that interests you enough to discuss?
Speaking as a baby boomer, i agree with all of this excerpt the categorization “boomerish” 
.
Personally, i think the onebox often gives exactly as much information as i want, and sometimes a bit more than that. Yes, it’s worth checking. (I am also a frequent phone-poster.) And yes, the edit window is long enough to clean it up if the onebox is not adequate. (If the edit window is not adequate, please complain. We can adjust that.)
But i haven’t noticed an epidemic of bare links, either. Maybe tend to see those as null posts and just skip over them.
Going back to the article, searching for the best passages, pasting them over, formatting them as quotes, typing some sort of comment, and checking the comment for typos and autocorrect errors in a 5-minute window is a race against time.
If you need to do all that, do it up front, of course. But often adding one or two sentences that say more or less what the onebox would have said is adequate.
I’ll be honest: my posting habits were formed on sites that are a lot less respectful of copyrights than this one. And in my personal posting, i am far more worried about violating copyrights than i am about not posting enough. I LOVE the onebox feature, because it’s often good enough, and I’m always certain i am not violating copyright by using it.
FYI, at least on my phone, there is a live preview, but you have to hit the little monitor icon at the bottom right of the dialog box to call it up.
Testing, testing.
Hmm, that mostly worked, but i couldn’t figure out how to exit preview mode.
To exit preview mode, click on the little pencil in the lower right corner.
So which is it? Not a rule, but don’t do it or it will lead to warnings.
That link is clearly relevant to the thread and was interesting to me. The incurious lose immeasurably few milliseconds as they scroll past.
I want someone with a link to an article they read years ago that they recall answers my question to feel comfortable sharing it even if they don’t have time to expound on it.
We’re talking about a GQ thread. Where OPs ask the entire world to be their librarians.
Thanks!