This just came up again:
homework is not acceptable if the asker has made no effort whatsoever
I'm developing a bit of an involuntary twitch that manifests itself when I encounter the word "effort" on Stack Overflow these days.
Don't get me wrong — effort is good. At least, productive eff...
How to change an HTML elements CSS class in response to an onClick event in JavaScript
Have you ever noticed how certain questions come up again and again on Stack Overflow sites?
Oh look, my PC is freezing. Should I use SELECT *? Oh, and, how can I host a server from home?
Really, people, do you want to be answering these same questions ten years from now? How about when you’re 65? That doesn’t sound so appealing now, does it?
We predicted this problem, even before we launched Stack Overflow. Why? Because the same thing happened on Usenet, where:
Most users could only see a few days or, at best, one month of archives for any given newsgroup. It was literally impossible …
Why does Stack Exchange use this weird “cc-wiki” euphemism instead of calling the CC-BY-SA by its real name?
This is a bug report disguised as a question. As in: please fix the footer.
Stealing Shog's comment-as-answer.
If the community has a consensus on anything, it's that simple questions are OK if:
The answers can be interesting.
It looks like there's a real problem being solved.
The person asking has shown an honest effort and at least a modicum of understanding.
Folk...
It’s been a few weeks now since Joel kicked off our “summer of love”. There’ve been some excellent discussions in the blog comments and on Meta, and we’ve tried to present some hard data on how objectively “nice” we are. But it’s high time to talk about what place “niceness” really has on Stack Exchange. And to do that, we need to start by talking about you:
You, sir, are a jackass.
And that’s ok.
Stack Overflow wasn’t created to be some utopian ideal of peace and love. When Jeff & Joel set out to create this system, they knew full well the sort of problems that face online commun …
