How to be a StackOverflow Sucker

I.e. how to be a 'senior' SO user (who joined after the beta in the fall of '08) and still up to this day to have < 1K rep.

The ultimate reference.

Step #0. Newer read the front page.

What on earth can be interesting there? Just a bunch of windoze C-fucking-sharp .blah useless crap. Or boring Java. Real programmers do not engage in that.

Step #1. Subscribe in your RSS reader to 1 tag--you favorite language, like you know, Cobol or Tcl or PL/I and stick to it.

Because of a doleful situation with people's IQ, there won't be much questions marked with this tag and each question will have max 16 views in 10 years.

Step #2. Look for questions asked by a sentient being with reputation equal to 1.

Chances that that sentient being has any idea how SO works are slightly less that 0%.

Step #3. Never try to clarify the question by posting a comment.

Obviously, if the question is bad or unclear it is better to answer anyway.

Step #4. Look for questions asked by a sentient being which has asked over 9000 questions already, has 15 rep. and 0% rate of accepted answers.

See the desc. of step #2.

Step #5. Search for a questions asked a year ago.

Don't forget to look into a user's profile--if 6 months ago is the last time the user was on the site--he is your client. Immediately begin to write the answer.

Step #6. Give a free advice not directly related to the question.

Everybody loves free advices. Especially the unbidden ones. For example, if the user asks for a Ruby gem doing X, tell him that Ruby is so 2009 and all cool kids are using Scala nowadays.

Step #7. Search for an old popular question with 32768 answers.

Carefully add your 32769. Don't waste your time by reading previous 32768.

Step #9. Complain in your cozy blog that English is not your mother tongue language and you just cannot compete with those crazy students on SO.

Everybody sane knows that English is not the only one language in the world and it is better in 2011 to write about programming in Russian.

Step #10. Post questions with a schema of all 512 tables of your database.

Asking how to refactor them helps too.

Step #11. Ignore markdown.

Write a wall of text in the answer. Combine a code snippet into a 1 long line.

Step #12. Write a harrowing story about SO (like this one), instead of answering SO questions.