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Recently I encountered this question

Plugin development - parse error

and as it's probably the first of this kind, I would propose to delete it and not to accept similar questions in the future.

Here is my thinking:

  • Typical for "have a bunch of code, does not work, debug my code and help me!"

  • Very unlikely somebody else is going to have the same issue, looks like more 1 one 1 help, which is not in the spirit of SE.

  • clearly not using an IDE and displaying bad coding practices.

How do you feel about it?

2 Answers 2

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I think it depends on how the question is worded. This is always how I decide whether I vote to close or not. A lot of the time, people say they have a code snippet (usually something they haven't even written themselves) and then go on to mention it doesn't work and ask what the solution is. This I do not like as it shows no effort.

If the user has started writing some code, for example a database query. They provide us detail with exactly what they're trying to do along with what they have already tried themselves, then this IMO is perfectly fine.

The question asked in the link you provided I believed was a fair valid question, due to the way it was worded, it fairly description and some effort was shown. This IS however my own opinion so people may disagree with me.

On Stackoverflow, there are thousands of question pending review for being closed. I've noticed a lot of people simply review for the sake of it without actually reading the question. However I believe the Joomla SE site will be very different in the way things are handled as I have noticed a lot by peoples comments on questions for the Joomla tag on SO.

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    Can't add much more than a +1 to this honestly. A blanket "no code help" policy IMO would hurt the site, but at the same time trying to review and advise on everyone's snippets isn't a good idea either. It's really going to be a judgment call of those reviewing and moderating.
    – Michael
    Commented May 5, 2014 at 0:18
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    I think the parse error linked to ended up being a good teaching opportunity. I think we definitely do want "what am I doing wrong here" questions because I know myself I can stare at something for hours. I think it's best to err on the side that the person has good intentions. Even if they don't (and they want you to do all the work), the chance it will help someone else with a similar problem in the future is high.
    – Andrew Eddie
    Commented May 5, 2014 at 4:09
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I think you are right, the SE site should be a high quality Q&A site and not a "fix my code I don't want to understand" site.

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