What's wrong with CodeGuru???

[Gldnguppy]

Oh, I agree. If you can figure out what is meant, then of course help the person. I don't look down on those who aren't able to write English as well as me. Afterall, I am not at all good at speaking/writing other languages. It just seems that some do not try to check their posts at all. That was all I was saying. Bravo to those of you that do speak English as a second language and can write posts well. I know I would be crippled if I had to write my posts in French or some other language. I didn't mean to give the wrong impression.

[Roger Allen]

A lot of the things I feel about CG have already been said. I will post a question if it has defeated me for some time (I am relatively advanced with certain areas of the MFC/C++), but it looks like when some people have a problem, they have not even attempted to try and solve it themself.

Its a knee jerk reaction, I have a problem -> post question.

If you really want to get a reply, show to others that you have tried something yourself and any areas of research you may have gone down to get where you have go to. This will alos help us target our answers to where the problem may lie.

Of course, if you have no MSDN or initial pointers on how to get started at a particular problem, people are always here to offer advice.


Roger Allen
Roger.Allen@sirius-analytical.com
I would like to think I helped, but I have trouble doing even that.

[pete515]

Hey, I am agreeing with you about vague questions but the point of the original posting wasn't about incoherent questions per se but more about the level of the question being asked. The author implied that you had to spend five sleepless nights before submitting a posting and reference every nook and cranny of MSDN before submitting anything. Seems a bit of a time waste if somebody is prepared to answer you on the forum. What's wrong with asking a question about repainting windows if you clearly label the 'beginner' box and somebody is happy to help out. After all people would switch off in droves if the only questions raised related to obscure technical areas and nobody else on the forum knew what you were talking about.

Pete.

Look out for Shadows - they move when you're not watching them.

[Gldnguppy]

I totally agree. I am a beginner. While I do spend some time in MSDN, I do not have the time to waste searching if someone does not mind answering my dumb question quickly for me.
You are right on target man.

[alanr]

To start, thanks for posting your opinions Alex. I agree with you 100%! CodeGuru has a ton of way cool examples and ideas available for free to anybody who has the patience to look and research through it. I have been coming to CodeGuru for over 2 years and in the beginning , I must confess, I posted some stupid, knee-jerk questions. When I realized you could search through past posts and found the CodeGurue library, I pretty much quit asking stupid questions. I have tried to contribute to the Codeguru community by posting code that took me a considerable amount of time and sweat to figure out. Somebody will just use it and not think twice about it. This is where I get angry. I am not talking about masssive amounts of praise. A kind one line e-mail would be enough. ANyhow, my .02 cents. Lets keep it real here as longs as possible.

info@envelopebudget.com
http://envelopebudget.com
Rate if it helped rank if it didn't!

[pete515]

Cheers!

Pete.

Look out for Shadows - they move when you're not watching them.

[ib042129]

Well, it is not the stupid posts that really bother me.What really concerns me is that some posts look like they are written by a student that just does not want to to their lab assighment for their C++ class

There is always hope!

[DanielK]

Every one has MSDN. Check out my signature:


Got a question? try looking it up in MSDN first. Msdn comes with the Visual Studio, and can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com
---===---
I'm not here for the rates, but rating a post is a good way for me to know how much i helped.
---===---
Daniel

[JohnCz]

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I have been with this forum for quite a long time (5/20/99 01:54 pm) and I have never posted single question. All posts are to help somebody.

As I have always stated there is no such a thing like stupid questions (see my signature).

This forum is being accessed by not English speaking programmers and sometimes is hard for them to clearly state a problem. After conversation, usually problem is stated properly and is solved.

I fully understand frustration when you come across lazy person asking to write whole code, but this is hardly a case here and can easily be ignored.

On this forum, we all are programmers (or at least that what I think I am) and just because of that fact certain level of logic and thinking is required. Laziness will lead to posting things like “My program does not work. Does anybody know why?” again this is not stupidity but laziness.

I remember times without Internet and with very poor documentation about programming in general and windows specifically. Transition from Assembly to C and than to C++, can be very frustrating without proper documentation and help.

We in the USA take too many things for granted, one of which is access to information. There are countries that do not have books about programming in numbers we have in the US, countries where access to the Internet is limited an expensive. All of the above maybe the very reason to keep postings as small as possible without regards for clarity.

I am more concerned about a rating rage. I have witnessed posts where mere asking for more information was rated –1 by original poster. It happened to me too.

I think we need some indicator of wrong (stupid) answer, but not as a tool to punish somebody for trying to be of help.

In conclusion:
I think I might have solution. Why not to split this forum in two: one for VC++ Windows Programming and other for C++ question. Maybe creating Windows Programming for Beginner would be helpful? This way if somebody prefers answering complicated questions would visit other forums and people who like to help starters would visit beginners’ forum more often?

Best Regards,




There is no such a thing like silly question, but there are many stupid answers.

I don't do it for ratings. However, rating tells me how my solution worked and that is important.
Good luck in your journey in a C++ land.

[Gldnguppy]

It has been mentioned that many questions are repeated hundreds of times, and suggested that no one searches these before posting. I agree, but perhaps this is not due to laziness but due to the shear hassle it is to search through threads of posts for an answer. The vast majority of posts do not have definite closure, no affirmation of a resolution. Sure there is a rating system that should guide people to helpful posts. I for one do not fully understand the rating system, and it seems to me that it is not widely used and probably not very helpful to anyone. It seems to me that there ought to be a way to tag a specific post as "THE ANSWER" to a question, and a way to search through posts that have a "THE ANSWER" tag. Doing this would filter out useless threads that have no working solution. Maybe I'm way off base? What do you think?

[baheath]

I agree with the part about splitting the forum. It seems like a lot of questions in this forum are about c++ only and not at all about VC++. This is just becuase there is no general c++ forum. To be honest, I don't know why there isn't a separate c++ forum already.

Brandon

[Alexandrov Alex]

Hi Igor! You understood me in a wrong way... I know that people are laze - this is the way I am myself. But people(and programmers) MUST respect each other. Everyone before posting his question to forum MUST take a look into MSDN at least. We all have a lot of job to do and we all want our nights to be spent not in looking at some lines of code but in looking at(at least looking at) lines of woman's body(as is was mentioned above)... If a programmer post his problem without trying to solve the problem - HE IS JUST AN EGOIST, AND I DO NOT LIKE HIM.



Best regards. Alex.

[Alexandrov Alex]

THANKS!!! That is what I meant!!!


Best regards. Alex.

[Saeed]

I can understand that students should not expect others to do their homework , as that undermines
the purpose of being a student.
However none of us can be expert in all the areas of MFC or C++.
Technology is growing so rapidly that you can only learn the basics and cross your finger
that you 'd be able to do anything based on what you know.
Some poeple work with COMs , some with ODBC, some Active-X ,Graphics,..etc
There are times that we human beings become unable to see the entire picture and look at the
problem from one particular angl and the chemical brain due to whatvere reason fails to see
the simple glitch..
In that case asking question to get you out of chasing after your tail is a good idea.

We all are students....No matter how many years you 'd been programming ..
And CG is a good school...
I do owe whatever I know from MFC to good posters of CG.


I will rate if your hint was helpful and expect to be rated if I was helpful ...

[VGirish]

Hi,

To say the truth, i answer the beginner's questions often b'coz thats one way to keep my basics intact. I am not able to remember all that i learnt and when i see some question, some kind of an answer pops up in my mind and to be sure, i just write a small piece of code and therefore i keep refreshing what i learnt.

Infact, i even have a project called CODEGURU ) which i use only to test some code and over the months, that has grown in size and has got really bigger and bigger and if you see them , you can see hundreds of commented out lines which are the lines of code that i tested. And whenever i have a doubt about some silly problem, i refer to that project first before even trying to look in this forum.

BOTTOM LINE : It keeps my little mind refreshed

But, i agree with you whole heartedly on one issue. LAZY PEOPLE. They dont even seem to know what the MSDN is !!!!! And they dont use the search feature too. After we do a search on their behalf and give them the answer, they say

YES. THANK YOU. THX A MILLION. WOW,YOU ARE GREAT. THAT WAS WHAT I WANTED. and things like that. And when i see such replies , i really feel like telling them that if that was what you wanted, then why the hell didnt you search for the answer first !!!!! X-(

Lets hope that those guys change

All Luck pal and have a great day.

If it helps and if you want to, you can Rate it.
Visit http://www.geocities.com/contactgirish/homepage.html for some VC++ Links & Notes.All Luck,
V.Girish
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