Hey DevRant Fam ❤️ hope everyone is well as always! It’s Sunday here in dull weather Sydney!, i was thinking bout this for awhile now, now surely most of us time to time use Stack Overflow for help and it works!.

Though, thats not the issue :-), my first time using it as a newbie wasn’t so great so to say, I’ve noticed that the people over at S/O can be quite rude such as they would downVote my question and also not comment why they have downvoted it :-(.

I’d love to know what you guys think, funnily enough I’m using DevRant much more than FB itself 😅, anyways guys hope you’re all having a great one!

Best wishes ❤️
Milo

Hello fellow Aussie!

And yeah stack overflow can be very volatile if you aren't pure pro at everything tbh.

I think a lot of us use devRant as our main social media as well tbh

@lxmcf agreed! Absolutely love DevRant, such a wonderful community with common interests and passions! Appreciate your response :-)

@Hubot-0x58 sorta on the same boat 😞 i got the “you need to start learning to ask questions properly” treatment ... 😏

Hey from a Scout camp in Sweden!

Wouldn't it be cool to build a dev forum based on devRant, but solely for programming questions? So using oauth or something?

@ScriptCoded I really like that idea :D

It's very easy to write a proper question.

Simply write it, then forget everything about yourself and read it. Do you understand it? Do you have everything you need to reproduce it? Is it succinct? Did you first Google it? Did you read the manual for the tech you're trying to use? Did you read the error message you got? Did you try anything to solve your problem yourself?

You can write down this check list, as it's far more than rules for posting. These are rules to live by. If you follow them, you will have solved any question before hitting the submit button. The few exceptions will get posted, and they will be treated with respect.

Respect the time, skill and mental sanity if the people that offer free help, and you will be respected.

@AndSoWeCode thats a pretty good checklist, I always try to do things myself before asking, i ask if I’m incredibly stuck on something, the main point of my post is - why are people on S/O (at some points) very aggressive, or i feel have the mentality of - ‘you must do it this way and thats that’ 🤔 - or for instance why do they downvote and not give a reason at all as to why they downvote.

Also thank you for taking your time to write down your response- I really appreciate it :-)

The main So site can be really toxic indeed... But I've found that a lot of the smaller subsites have real nice communities...

@Hubot-0x58 I agree to that also

@joykill very true mate ! :D

@KingMilo I've been on that site for almost the entirety of its lifetime. In that time I never got any predominantly bad reactions to a question. I had criticism for not reading the rules (i did not) and not posting a specific debug output required for that topic, that was highlighted in the rules.
I can understand that. There are people there that read tens of questions on that topic every day. And they can answer then just like that if they had a specific debug output that's easy to obtain, but they have to beg for it every time.

It's really true - you need to ask the question in the most helpful way (you can see what that is by reading similar questions) and you will get a swift good answer, unless it's something esoterical.

@AndSoWeCode well i guess, you live and you learn. :-)

On S/O:
- Have you googled your question
- Are you sure
- Do it again
- Again.
- No answer found?
- Check the docs.
- Are you sure

And only then
- code snippet
- Explanation of what should happen
- Your guess where the error is
- Politeness 102

And only then you'll get an answer.
Maybe.

@beggarboy well that is a fair answer I must say , thank you mate 🤓

On one hand to learn you need to ask questions.

On the other hand the stacks have a littered with bad questions, much like raspberry pi forums with more noise than help.

It’s kind a like a pendulum. Right now the swing is toward Stack exchange being for people who don’t have questions. It makes it tough. But it also makes you think about your question really hard and thus we tend not to ask the lazy questions.

I hate working for half an hour on a question or even longer, but a good number of times I have answered my own question here working on the questions. That in itself is a benefit.

To the optimist the glass is half full. To the pessimist the glass is half empty. To the physicist the glass is always full. :-)

@xcodesucks good point mate, I haven’t asked any questions for over a year on S/O, my reason being is I’m trying to do it by myself. Though if I’m really stuck, i just search it and many times it will be an already answered question :-)

*hug* :)

@c3ypt1c take my ++ 🤓

S/O tries to make their users follow certain standards especially when asking a question. You need to keep in mind that when you ask a question, you are expected to show what you have already done even if it's minimum. If you haven't shown any input from your side, you are guaranteed to be marked down.

@Lyubo thank you for your kind response :-)