Hello all
This community was created to help programmers to improve their knowledge and coding skills. Sharing tutorials and guides, clarifying your doubts and helping other fellow programmers.
Recently, we have seen a rise in the number of people copy pasting their code and asking for help. Although there are moderators in this community who try to help out as much as they can, it is clearly not feasible to debug people's code in detail.
Hence, we thought we would put together a guide on how to ask for help. Let's first go through the list of scenarios that is acceptable,
- Technical error: For example, you might be getting compile errors on the Online Judge and your code is working on your machine, or you might have questions about some specific features in the language. In such cases, please give a good description of your problem so that we can answer your question. What error does it give on the online judge? What did you try?
- Specific queries: It's okay to highlight a few lines in your code and ask for help regarding those few lines.
- Complete beginners: If you are solving your first few problems, it is okay to post short codes.
- Non-code questions: Any question thats related to competitive programming, for which you are not asking the moderator to look at your code.
- Helping you find the solution: If you can't solve a problem and have been stuck for a while, explain your solution and try to make your explanation detailed about the part in your code you think might have mistakes.
What we are seeing people do sometimes and is NOT acceptable, is copy pasting your code and asking the moderator to debug it for you. A big part of solving the problem is debugging your code. Nobody will debug your code in the real contest, so if you don't get skilled in debugging your code you will suffer in real contests. If you are have doubts whether your solution is correct or not, explain your solution logic.
Let's collaborate to make this platform one of the best informative forums on the Internet.