If people are going to post questions with code samples in this forum, I think we need to maybe address some basic underlying requirements. Personally, I prefer a loose moderation wherein we try to ensure a few basic quality of life requirements in posts:
- Try not to provide screenshots of code since that’s harder to review
- If you need help debugging, please try to only provide the bare minimum portions of your code which are relevant
- If possible, try to provide a runnable example of your code in question
- Try to explain: what you’ve tried, what the error is, what you think the problem is
I’m not trying to sound pushy about forum etiquette. But I personally am much more likely to review code that meets the above requirements. I like something I can compile and run quickly. I prefer some context as to where the issue probably is. Everything else is sort of secondary to me, but still matters.
What does the community think? Also, what do we want this community to do? Support specific programming questions or general CS career/education questions? Both?
Theres currently three learning-related communities in the instance (+1 for 4 if you include teach programming). No stupid questions is a general question one, ask experienced devs is more for cs career questions and things you want to ask to developers, and this one is more for people just starting out. I would say it can have both with more of an emphasis of people new to coding (+ being a spot for learning resources) while the others are more for once people code more
The requirements look good to help people get their stuff solved
I like those requirements. I’ll stick a post with them in the top of the community, along with some about career/education questions if you don’t mind.
I think that, being still a small community, we can address both topics by now, and if engagement gets too complicated due to community growth, we can split the community. If you all think differently, we can split topics right now, but I think it’s too early for that. Thoughts?
I think these seem reasonable, to start. I do prefer not having to type out code myself. It would make sense also, to provide some guidelines for people about how to format code as well.
Might also be worth generating some guidelines for people responding to questions and posts. A quick way to turn someone off of programming is to answer or respond to a question in a way that makes them feel unwelcome or dismissed.
True. Typing out code should be as simple as copy/paste inside two lines of three “backticks” (backtick: `)
E.g.
``` My code ```
My code
