Free Code = Laziness!!!

[Webnerd]

Ok I don't vent that much but I get so tired of this one common thing. Users login to the forum to get help, answers, have homework done for them, whatever the reason. There are those of us who "know how" and thos of us who "want to know how".

I am a "know how" for the most part. When people submit "help" requests, I am more than happy to offer help. Sometimes a script that I write is not "perfect" and will not run "perfectly" the first time. What I HATE is when the recipient writes back:

I tried your code and it doesn't work.

And that is ALL they write!!!!

Why can't they take a small minute to try and figure out "why"? Everyone just wants a "FREE SOLUTION" and I AM NOT PAID TO BE HERE. So, if someone offers you a piece of code and you choose to try it out, be willing to WORK WITH THAT PERSON to achieve your goal. Not just send them a message if there is a small bug in the code.

[JPnyc]

To begin with, I think of help forums such as this one as a place to get assistance with your coding, not a place to get free coding done for you. If a user has absolutely no knowledge of coding, and is not willing to learn, they should hire someone to do it for them. I'll help anybody who wants to learn, however.

[Webnerd]

It's funny, the same thing just happened AGAIN. What is wrong with some people??? I don't mind helping at all, but at least, if you are asking for help, be willing to WORK FOR YOUR SOLUTION. If you come here for FREE CODE, then you are in the wrong place! Yes, some people post helpful scripts but for the most part, we are all normal every-day "joe's" just like you and expect to be respected and appreciated for our efforts.

[nshiell]

When I give help for code I always ask why do you want this code written,
What do you need it to do.

If people aswer those kind of questions the only barrier left is the code syntax.

Most newbee problems come from people trying to make a solution to a problem without understanding the problem first.

I like to help people to fix their problems i can't be bothered to write copy-pase code

[aj_nsc]

I personally can't stand even using the php tags on here when I'm helping somebody (unless it's specifically a syntax based question I'm dealing with).

When it comes to what seems to be newbies asking questions/fishing for free code, I basically post the logic of how to go about solving a problem that they have and give them general methods on how to make it all work. As a really oversimplified example, if someone were to ask a question about how they would make a members based website work, I would say that php sessions are the way to go.

I'm not sure if I have in the past, but I would never post my own code for anybody looking for help unless they posted some first, or at least showed some real interest in learning and understanding how to solve their problem.

[JPnyc]

I don't believe in coding for free, personally. But I'll help someone who is doing the coding and has a problem, that's assuming I CAN help.

[WebJoel]

Looking back over my posts of the past, I have shed some mad code with people whom don't understand or appreciate what I did. My peeve is the ubiquitous 'I validated my code and it passed' and when *I* validate it on the loosest level, it comes up with a few dozen errors and warnings, missing !doctype, deprecated and/or proprietory tags. Things like doubled-quotes, un-escaped characters in script, not using char-entities when they should etc, -and even spelling mistakes. Horror of horror, 'dat kid speek u no wut I meen'? That riles me to near anger and no matter what the problem is I don't care if the homework is on fire, I wish 'em the best of luck and click-through without offering my help.

But if a postee provides just a bit of code and actualy shows some insight into what they are doing, I'm all for Santa.

[KDLA]

If a post starts out with "...i'm a newbie and need...," I just forward them a link to an article with a tutorial. No code.

I don't know why, but "newbie" (*cringe*) is usually the clue.

KDLA

[NogDog]

I don't see what the big deal is. People are free to ask for whatever help they want. I am likewise free to ignore those requests if I feel they are lazy, they should be hiring someone to do the work, the subject doesn't interest me, my abilities are too superior to their inferior knowledge for me to deign to help them, or because Venus is in Aquarius this week. If you likewise find a thread that you feel does not deserve your attention, just ignore it and move on to one that does. Beating your chest about people who aren't as driven as you are to learn for a skill is about as likely to change the way they operate as I am likely to turn G.W.Bush into a highly disciplined practitioner of critical thinking by screaming until I burst a blood vessel.

[JPnyc]

You won't change them, no, but by handing out free code to everyone that asks we would be kind of undermining the people out there who make a living at it.

Or to put it another way (this is just for dog) "I'd rather trust a man who doesn't give away what he's found. There's no need for free code if you're homeward bound"

[WebJoel]

A hand-out, -or a hand-up. I am starting to lean towards the latter. I have nothing to offer anyone whom has more training than I, but offering full-blown freebies to those whom are less skilled than I might be taking bread off of their table, in their eyes. I do enjoy though, weeks or months later, accidentally tripping into a page that I recognize the starter-code that is something I may have in some small way, helped with. :)

[NogDog]

Where did I suggest anyone should give free hand-outs? I'm just suggesting that it's not worth agonizing over. If someone requests and gets a free hand-out, good for them. If they get totally ignored, that's fine by me, too. I was just trying to suggest that there are better things to spend your time worrying about. (You know: will you finish the project you're working on in time, what did your significant other mean by that comment he/she made last night, or is the Yellowstone caldera going to erupt next week, destroying civilization as we know it?)

[JPnyc]

It's not worth agonizing over. I respond to the posts I want to, when I have the time. Unless it's a user issue or something like that which it's my job to handle.

[nshiell]

There is nothing wrong with being a newbee per say;
I am a newbee at many things it's just anoying when people expect u to nurse maid them solutions

[JPnyc]

I usually try to tell them the way it is. I can outline an approach for somebody, but I tell them that if they have no experience in the language they're trying to use then what they are attempting to do is probably beyond their skills.

[WebJoel]

I try to not respond to 'classwork assignments' that I recognize. If identified as such and there is a need for help, I'm good with it. I would help. I do worry that the instructor grading the work will know that the student didn't do the work. I have seen some 'assignment' work posted here before. I recognize the textbook assignment. I did it myself a few years back. -Seemed pretty difficult then, almost laughably simple now.
I only mentioned 'handing out freebies' possibly taking work way from others from a conversation I had with a high-tech industry family member whom mildly disapproves of quantity of 'free help' that some forums dole out. Myself, I don't quite concur. I've certainly benefited alot from 'free help' found here (often, via searching the archives) and, hope that this doesn't make me seem 'lazy'. :) -I just can't resist picking some low-hanging fruit when I need to wrap a project up with bonus value-added eye-candy x-browser stuff, and of course, -get paid for it to boot. :)

[KDLA]

I agree with Joel. My irritation with "newbie" requests is mostly directed at the ones who say "I'm a total newbie to web design, but would like to set up for a client an ecommerce site with a complex database search capability and the ability to have multiple stylesheets.... can someone tell me how to do that?" type of thing. Or, even worse - "I'm in high school and have decided to become a web designer to earn some money over the summer. What do I need to learn to get high-end clients?" :D

KDLA

[JPnyc]

To those people, I generally try to be honest. Something along the lines of "if you have no experience with clientside and serverside coding, SQL, database creation, then the unpleasant reality is you don't have a realistic chance of doing this yourself. It takes considerable knowledge to do what you're describing". Not the answer they WANT, but what else can ya say?

[Webnerd]

I think a huge problem with the web industry, is all the "newbies" who previously found it very easy to do web sites using Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG appls, are now realizing that they know nothing of value. And those people, when they want to actually "do something", are lost. So, they come here for solutions.

I am always quite amazed to see developers who post questions like:

"I saw a site where a user clicked a button and my choice was automatically saved in the database...without the page ever posting back. How do they do that?"

Any modern developer NEEDS to know current trends and languages that are used. And at least, understand their usage whether they know how to program in them or not. I don't know a lick of Ruby but I know enough about how Ruby and the Rails platform works to make decisions on project approaches compared to using PHP. I also know when to use AJAX programming and when not to; when it benefits and when it hinders a project.
It seems that these "key" elements are not being taught to "newbies" as the "newbies" think they can just use borrowed code for all of their projects.

Here is a good example. I worked at a web firm 5 years ago. We were looking for some support in a project and we interviewed a PHP developer who looked very impressive on paper and had some good examples. Even some of his code examples "seemed good". I asked him to provide a calendar for a website. Something very simple, 1) Display dates in a bulleted list, 2) A user clicks on the date to see the event, 3) A simple admin page to add events.

This guy, apparently, didn't know squat about PHP. This was back when the "register globals" scare went around and PHP made some major changes with defaults. He had provided a piece of crap solution that only worked with "register globals" on and he used someone else's code that WAS NOT properly licensed and it was waaaaaaay too much work to add an event and extremely difficult to follow. We asked him to fix this and fix that. Something that would have taken me 20 minutes to fix, took him over 12 hours and still, had not fixed the main problem with the "register globals".

So, what I am trying to say is, SCREW THE NEWBIES, there are PLENTY of web resources , online tutorials, books and jobs out there that can teach them how do the things that I have learned in my 15 years in this industry. I never once, looked for handouts and I have no respect for those who do so.

I only try to respond to posts that are either quick and easy or truly strange and complex. So many times I just want to tell some of these people, "Get a freaking book and learn for your damn self!"

[KDLA]

I can see where you are coming from. Part of the problem, though, is that any Joe Idiot can post "tutorials" out there, and people find them and use them. (Even a few of the methods found at W3Schools aren't the best.) Some of the requests here, though marginal, are these poor hapless souls who decided to use this coding and can't figure out why it doesn't work in Firefox, or Safari, or with the latest version of IE. True, these are mostly the WYSIWYG dependents who've cut and pasted without a clue; but, they've got to learn somehow and that's what this forum is for - providing information about method of coding, rather than straight coding. So, you've got to cut them just a *little* slack. That's why I refer them to Good tutorials, from accredited resources like ALA, Berea Street, Simple Bits, etc.

[JPnyc]

You'd be amazed (and probably depressed) at how many people are making a living out there simply cutting and pasting code without having a clue as to how it works. I was pretty shocked.

[Webnerd]

I just saw a post in the JS forum. A guy writes:

"How do you submit a form from a select box without having to click the submit button?"

Although this is a viable question and quite simple to implement, what on earth is a person like this doing coming to the forum for??? They should be looking at other web coding examples or at a book!

This is the kind of posting that aggravates me; complete LAZINESS!! This guy has enough sense to get on the internet, type something into a search box (that obviously leads him here???). When I type "submit form with select box" into Google, there is not a single link for the WebDeveloper forums on the first page of the results. So my point is, this person just wants someone to write the code for him and not learn anything.

[nshiell]

I don't mind people asking questions, that is the best way to find stuff out. What Isn't good is when people know the language can formulate some code and expect u to paste in codfe for them.

What I think is the best challenge for us to do is to answer posts where people don't get the concepts behind what they are trying to do; like when I had someone trying to create a varable using an eval?

Once you understand what you want to do and you are thinking in the right direction the systax should be easy

[scragar]

I love it when you give some people a push in the right direction and they can run with it to produce working code themselves, all they need help with was getting the idea started. Those people are great, the problem is that they are so few of the people you see her...

On the other hand I've provided people with fully functional examples and such to demonstrate how to do stuff, yet they can't take this even 1 step to style it(I'm talking background colours and removing paragraphs here). Kinda annoying when you think about it that way.

[JPnyc]

I just saw a post in the JS forum. A guy writes:

"How do you submit a form from a select box without having to click the submit button?"

Although this is a viable question and quite simple to implement, what on earth is a person like this doing coming to the forum for??? They should be looking at other web coding examples or at a book!

This is the kind of posting that aggravates me; complete LAZINESS!! This guy has enough sense to get on the internet, type something into a search box (that obviously leads him here???). When I type "submit form with select box" into Google, there is not a single link for the WebDeveloper forums on the first page of the results. So my point is, this person just wants someone to write the code for him and not learn anything.Well no, they shouldn't. That's the purpose of a forum, to have questions answered. Those kinds of things we welcome here. We'll help anyone with their coding, we just won't do it for 'em.

[dc2007]

i also disagree with your opinion i am new to java and ajax im more of a php man my self but i am having problems coding a form with ajax and i have read the book that i was told to read AJAX and PHP and its not helped one bit in what i am trying to do. all i asked for was if someone could do a bit of code to start me off and i would figure out the read.

[Fang]

i also disagree with your opinion i am new to java and ajax im more of a php man my self but i am having problems coding a form with ajax and i have read the book that i was told to read AJAX and PHP and its not helped one bit in what i am trying to do. all i asked for was if someone could do a bit of code to start me off and i would figure out the read.
Just show that you have attempted to solve the problem is usually sufficient to obtain help.
If you describe the problem without showing any code you are unlikely to obtain help.

[Declan1991]

The ones I hate are those who post whole pages of code with no [code][php][html] etc. tags.

[WebJoel]

The ones I hate are those who post whole pages of code with no [code][php][html] etc. tags. I'm afraid that I'm guilty of doing that myself. If what I am 'returning' is one's corrected code and I need to highlight the changes, I have to use [quote] in order to do that. I am 'quoting back' the changed document and the bold text are my footnotes/revisions/important parts to give extra attention to, etc.. Else if I used the proper wrapper, the "<b>" and "</b>" are shown in the code, -which is almost always wrong and most certainly confusing if OP copy-&-pastes this directly into an html-editor or SAVEs it and views via browser.

I do try to put longer examples into qualifying [html] (if html) or [code] brackets if it's a combination of html, javascript and css if nothing else, to render the post within the scrollbox. I dislike it when a lengthy string of javascript code is placed 'in the message area' as text, and it has no whitespace so the browser creates horizontal scrolling to accomodate this...
As a moderator I sometimes go into newbie posts and wrap "[code]" around one's page-sized text-only version and thus, elminate the horizontal scrollbar that otherwise appear on the browser for the home user.. I'd rather the horizontal scroller be on the 'code box' where it belongs..

[JPnyc]

The ones I hate are those who post whole pages of code with no [code][php][html] etc. tags.
I actually prefer that. I think the code box makes it more difficult to read, not easier.

[scragar]

I do find that the code box is sometimes harder to read, but it's much better than running into a problem of having a huge horizontal scroll on the site that means every time you want to read a new line of a message you have to scroll.
HTML and PHP boxes are the only ones I would recomend though, the highlighting makes them easier to look through, even if it's not exactly more readable.

[hyperlisk]

Just to throw in my two cents, I don't like people that throw in a 'thanks in advance.' Generally, if I see that, I just hit the back button.

[nshiell]

Stop being so cynical.

I like being helpful, if I can help someone out then thats all good. I ask questions, I give answers (although few of my questions get good replys these days).

[root123]

It's a hapenning thing everywhere....

[DALCWBSMAVS]

I understand both aspects. On one hand, if one is not willing to learn then I refuse to help. But if one is willing to learn then I am willing to put forth the effort.

There is nothing against helping a 'newbie' either. Aren't we all one at one point or another? I have been doing HTML for a few years and I am now a 'newbie' at RPG & CL. As long as the time and effort is there, any respectable person within the related field should be willing to help.

That's just my two cents...

[WebJoel]

... I don't like people that throw in a 'thanks in advance.' Generally, if I see that, I just hit the back button. Actually, that disturbs me a tiny little bit too, for no discernible reason. :confused: I guess imho that it implies that a dependence relationship could be forthcoming. Or not. -It could just be good manners. Respect goes a long way with me.
-If I were to ask for some site-critical help in, say, the php or java forum, I would be the total quintessential newbie. "Please" and "thank you" would most definitely be in my manner of asking.. My biggest fear would not be not getting any help. It would be in offending the gurus whom might see what I am asking for as so totally simple that they think I wasn't even trying to learn and that I merely wanted a free handout.. Nothing wrong with "Free", though. -The answers in the archive are free, too.

[developer_girl]

Personally I think most people DO try to figure out a solution on their own and come here only as a last resort.

Sure, I'm guilty of posting words like "I tried your code and it didn't work", but I also figured out WHY it didn't work.

Asking for help does not equal laziness.

[KDLA]

Personally I think most people DO try to figure out a solution on their own and come here only as a last resort.
I guess the outlook is dependent upon how much you visit and been a member. I'd estimate that 45% of posts are asking for free code, sometimes under the guise of "how do you do that, can you show me?"
Then, too, us moderators see stuff that you all don't see -- posts like "I might pay you a little money if you'll do this for me" type of thing. Not necessarily "free" code requests, but not exactly a request for education, either. :rolleyes:

KDLA

[mattyblah]

one of my biggest gripes is people who post stuff like "I need a solution for xxx and I need it ASAP. Please help immediately!!" Or double posts like the previous, then another post later like "Anyone?? Why the <expletive> is no one answering!!?" We're all here helping others, but there is nothing that obligates us to help others. Googling most problems should bring up an anwer, but in the case it doesn't, well it's not our problem that a poster doesn't know his/her job, is it? just my .02.

[JPnyc]

Personally I think most people DO try to figure out a solution on their own and come here only as a last resort.

Sure, I'm guilty of posting words like "I tried your code and it didn't work", but I also figured out WHY it didn't work.

Asking for help does not equal laziness.
We are not talking about those people, however. We are talking about the people who have no knowledge of code at all, and come here wanting to make some element fly around their page or change color, or want to create a login protected site without even knowing what a database is. Those people expect the work to be done for them, and for free, because they actually have no idea what is involved.

[mattyblah]

Personally I think most people DO try to figure out a solution on their own and come here only as a last resort.

Sure, I'm guilty of posting words like "I tried your code and it didn't work", but I also figured out WHY it didn't work.

Asking for help does not equal laziness.

of course, us as code providers should know the code works, but there are those times when we replace <user code> with <generic code> and expect the solution to work. Perhaps what we're saying is that if you know x, and we post y as a variant of x, you should be able to fit y into you situation. Again, a lot of presumption is involved.

[JPnyc]

well we don't always have time to test out code before we post it. It does still rely on the author having some idea about the language. But I reiterate if you have no clue whatsoever how to assemble code into a webpage, you should hire someone who does, or use a WYSIWYG, whichever suits your needs best.

[Kravvitz]

It's good to know I'm not the only one annoyed by this.

NogDog makes an excellent point.
Part of the problem, though, is that any Joe Idiot can post "tutorials" out there, and people find them and use them. (Even a few of the methods found at W3Schools aren't the best.)
Yeah. :(


The ones I hate are those who post whole pages of code with no [code][php][html] etc. tags.
I actually prefer that. I think the code box makes it more difficult to read, not easier.
I don't like horizontal scrolling in the code boxes, otherwise I find them helpful.

[Stephen Philbin]

The code boxes actually cause horizintal scrolling on the entire page for me (resolution 800x600). It makes reading a thread a real pain.

[toicontien]

I don't like posts asking to help with homework, however I will help anyone who posts sample code and shows some thought into the problem. I do post code examples though. If the code or function is simple and mundane enough, I have no problem giving away a 12 line function I wrote 2 years ago, which took me 2 minutes to write. Anything more and I'm reluctant to just give code. Sometimes I will post a fairly complex bit of code and a lengthy explanation, if the OP shows an interest in knowing how it works. No interest and effort = no help.

[TecBrat]

I had a similar experience. I have no formal training since highschool, where I took Pascal for an AP class. I have hacked and twisted bits of code until I figured out how to do a decent amount of stuff in PHP, a little Perl and even less Javascript.

Occasionally I'll see a situation that my skillset will actually allow me to help out on. Sometimes it is easier for me to grab a snippet of code than to give a walkthrough. The problem I had was that the asker apparently didn't even know how to read code! Why bother trying to get help if you can't read code?

There are times that I wish someone would just write it for me, but I know I wouldn't benefit from it in the long run.

I guess the good thing about a thread like this is that folks looking for answers that happen upon it will get an understanding of what to expect.

No free code? Maybe just a little.