Long (Cut and Paste) Questions and Answers

[Former Member]

Quite often, people asking questions simply paste a copy of the entire program in the question and ask "What's wrong with this" without doing any analysis.

Even oftener, people responding to questions paste long answers that they have found elsewhere (and generally do not attribute).

I think it would be a good idea if all posts could be limited in size to say 50 lines. This would force those asking questions to do some initial work before sending their problem to the forum. It would also force responders to try to analyze the question and come up with a relevant answer.

As a side effect, it would limit the growth of the forum's files and it would make it easier to browse an entire thread.

Any takers?

Rob

[michael_goeck]

Hi,

what a coincidence. Just the last days we had severe forum issues, where the whole cluster went down almost once per hour.

The reason was a 800 KB message that contained a longer part of 3000 empty characters. Jive forums have a filter concept that e.g. exchanges the markup syntax with the respective HTML/CSS tags. It obviously iterates over every character with expensive regular expressions and blocks the CPU completely. If someone tried to open this thread, the forums went down...

So we have and will do something in this area.

Regards,

Michael

[Former Member]

Great!

Rob

[former_member583013]

Rob, I'm going to redirect your proposal to the Moderators Forum...Going to inform you if I get some news -:)

Greetings,

Blag.

[Former Member]

Thanks Blag.

Rob

[former_member583013]

Your welcome -;)

Greetings,

Blag.

[Former Member]

Is there any way I can put a watch on a thread in a forum I don't have access to?

Rob

[former_member583013]

I don't think so...Moderators forum is hidden, so without special rights you can't follow any thread...

Greetings,

Blag.

[Former Member]

In a similar vein, many questions and answers look like entire production programs. I wonder how a company (particularly a consulting company) would feel if it found out that a program that it had spend thousands of dollars developing for proprietary use was posted on the internet.

I wonder what SDNs legal position might be in this case.

Blag - feel free to add this to the post in the moderators forum.

Rob

[former_member583013]

Rob...It's done -:) Thanks for pointing that out -;)

Greetings,

Blag.

[former_member197348]

Good idea Rob,

This has been my concern too from long time. Some people just copy and pasting Functional and Technical requirements (I guess it is specification) as it is. The forums are for helping but not for free-lance programming.

In addition to that, I see so many posts for a single problem. Without searching forum at all, some people blindly posting the questions. My suggestion is to make search mandatory . After posting the question only two buttons should be provided one for search and one for discard. In Search results page, Post message button should be provided.

This may help to restrict duplicate questions and meaning less lengthy questions.

regards,

Siva