As you can see I am fairly new to Stackoverflow, so my reputation is not high enough to be able to write comments (a limitation I am having hard time understanding the basis of). I have several times been in a situation where I want to answer a question but perhaps need some additional information from the person who posted it. My problem is that I cannot find any other way to communicate this in the “thread” other then posting an “answer” (please correct me if I am wrong). However, this usually means that my answer will get voted down (which I understand since it is not a real answer to the question) causing me to loose reputation and get ever further from the ability to post a comment.
So in short, what is the correct way to communicate something which should be a comment without been able to write one?