People not doing their homework...

[Dave_15]

Hi All,

This is my first post...

I am willing to help anyone with any technical issue I know the answer to, and many that I have to research to give them an accurate answer to. But when people want someone to do their homework for them, or worse yet, do the work they are being paid for, I find it offensive that they would even ask.

On this site, and many others I often see posts requesting things like "How to write an ATM machine in C++", or "How to impleent a Quicksort in Java".

These are obvious homework questions which the OP has not even begun to research on their own.

I also often see postings requesting people asking for help writing the code they need to do their job.

To have these posts thrown in with all the legitimate requests for help from newbies and from professionals who are stuck, seems very wrong.

If the DaniWeb site had some way to mark these types of posts, shuch that they could be given a low priority, or even hidden from view, that would really help me. Then I do not have to wade through them when I am looking to help the people that legitimately need help and should be getting my attention.

I think that no one person's opinion should cause this, it should require at least 3 votes of HOMEWORK, and after that be removed from the stream of new posts presented to me when I log in.

The OP should be told what and why, and once yanked from the 'new' posts list, the post should be reviewed by an official reviewer from DaniWeb to see what happens next.

I hereby volunteer to review these posts, once the code/system is in place to allow the voting.

What do the rest of you think?

Would this improve YOUR DaniWeb experience?

It would absolutely improve mine.

Thanks!

--Dave

[rproffitt]

Thanks Dave.

That's a deep subject and can have us discuss a wide range of areas such as what is DaniWeb and social expectations. There is a Read Me First at https://www.daniweb.com/programming/threads/435023/read-this-before-posting-a-question that covers a lot of what many members expect of those that post but before you go there, find Dani's posts about DaniWeb and see if you can get to what she is trying to accomplish.

That said, many folk don't know how forums work or are in a hurry and may show disrepect at first. Somehow, we need to gently give them feedback and not set them on fire then send them screaming into the world telling everyone how mean we are. This is hard. No one said it would be easy.

[AssertNull]

You can "flag" a bad post, though that's generally for spam, illegal stuff, porn, bad language, racism, etc., etc. Stuff to be deleted ASAP. It's generally pretty obvious stuff. I don't know that plagiarism and "Do my work/homework for me" quite rise to the "Flag bad post" level. Perhaps a mod will weigh in.

Regarding an obvious no-effort poster, anyone, including you, can anonymously and subjectively downvote any post, with an option to leave a comment explaining why (ditto with UP-votes). You can look at any member's profile before deciding to help. If they have a lot of posts with downvotes or a lot of comments with "Do your own homework" or similar, you can look at your posts and see if you agree with that assessment and if so, refuse to help.

Every poster with negative (or positive) rep has a little number next to them with that rep. You don't have that number because no one's repped you yet (I'm going to up-rep you when I submit this post so you should see that won't be the case anymore). For the most part folks with negative rep have earned it, though again it's all subjective, so if you see a negative number next to someone, check out their profile because it's a possible red flag.

It would be nice to be able to sort/prioritize threads based on upvote to downvote ratio. To my knowledge, and I may be wrong, that's not currently an option, so you do have to do that quick click. But once you do, it's visible pretty fast.

There's been a lot of back-and-forth about whether Daniweb is too tolerant about "Do my homework" posters. I won't rehash that debate here. As far as volunteering to help, HappyGeek would be the guy to contact probably, though he'll likely see this thread anyway.

To summarize, up-vote, down-vote, and look at others' votes. Who helps who and why is subjective, but that's the best way currently to sift through posts and figure out who you want to help.

EDIT -- Note: If you leave a comment on a vote, it's no longer anonymous.

[AssertNull]

I'm going to up-rep you when I submit this post so you should see that won't be the case anymore

Well I upvoted you, but no number next to your name yet. I tried. :) Guess you have to get upvoted in another forum to get the positive number.

[happygeek]

Hi Dave, welcome to DaniWeb. The posting rules which are sadly ignored by so many (who probably don't even bother reading them) state: "Do provide evidence of having done some work yourself if posting questions from school or work assignments."

Those who ignore this rule can get an infraction under the 'Keep it Organised' criteria that this rule sits in. Usually this is restricted to those who just paste a question up without any additional comment apart from maybe 'I NEED THIS BY TOMORROW' or somesuch. More often we will try and cajole further information, by way of whatever code or pseudo-code they have, from the poster. Although this is only successful in some cases, when it is at least the poster can get some actual help in understanding the task at hand and hopefully that will help them going forward.

It's a problem that has always been around, and we do our best to deal with it while still trying to help folk where possible. We won't do homework for anyone, there are plenty of dodgy sites that do that. We will try and help people. Which is why the only way we can deal with this is by the methods explained. Preventing newbies from posting a homework help question would just mean they would go somewhere else less picky, and possibly get the kind of ready made help that actually helps nobody. Likewise, the method of flagging posts and having a review process would put even more strain on our team of unpaid moderators. As they are also the people who tend to help most, it would mean less time available to spend helping the members who you regard as 'genuine' if you see what I mean.

Ultimately, of course, it's up to you who you choose to help and how. Ignore the homework help posters entirely if that's what you want to do, and as you say they are pretty easy to spot, nobody will judge you for it... :-)

[Dani]

When a member votes a question down with a reason, then its negative votes show up when browsing the list of threads, so you can quickly choose to ignore downvoted questions.

You can't change reputation in this feedback forum, sorry.

[Dave_15]

Thank you all, this has been a great introduction to the site!

--Dave

[Dani]

Yay!! Welcome :)