This question already has an answer here:

This is the post that made me thinking: Python - Array - homework. Screenshot for <10k users:

Screenshot for <10k users

I totally agree with all the comments that Stack Overflow is not a homework forum. However, when I looked at the question, simply ignoring it didn't feel right either. So in the spirit of "be nice to new contributors", I decided giving hints might be the best way to help her without turning Stack Overflow into a homework forum. After all, that's the way I would have helped her if she were to come to me in person.

Since then, there are 5 downvotes on the question and 2 on my answer. I'm not trying to complain about the downvotes, because I can imagine some valid reasoning for that. But what I'm afraid of is, we may be not nice enough to new contributors. She may never come back to Stack Overflow again just like those who never went back to the basketball court because they were ignored or laughed at by the veteran athletes the first time they did.

Is it really right to hold veterans and newbies to the same question/answer standards? Didn't we all start with no clues and asking the wrong questions?


After reading all the constructive comments below, also based on the about page, I've found my misunderstanding. I always thought helping OP solving that specific problem and lowering bars for beginners also had heavy weight in SO's mission (so a personal help forum in loose term). But seems I was wrong, SO's mission is to build a Q&A repository that can help all, of which OP is just one. It's colder than I thought, but it could be a more practical way to maintain quality and maximize utility.

marked as duplicate by gnat, Michael Gaskill, Robert Longson, Blackwood, Stephen Rauch Feb 3 at 15:58


  • 20
    oh hey i see the "new contributor" sign under my name, didn't realize this is my first SO meta post, how ironic. Guys, be nice to me, a new contributor:) – Indominus Feb 2 at 1:37
  • 7
    Highly relevant: How do I ask and answer homework questions? – Josh Caswell Feb 2 at 2:14
  • 22
    It is a lot less complicated then it needs to be, the vast majority of SO users think it is nice when they get a solution to their problem and anything else as not-nice. That's one heck of a not-nice answer you posted, "go google this" is never an appropriate answer. Not just to the OP, imagine anybody else googling that question and be told by you to google more. – Hans Passant Feb 2 at 8:11
  • 2
    @HansPassant, usually I would agree with you, and I almost never do this "go google it" thing. It is just this particular question was (fairly) criticized to be not show much effort to take a crack at the homework. That's is why I intentionally gave hints instead of answers, I thought that would be better for a student just started learning. – Indominus Feb 2 at 9:33
  • 2
    I think that the nice approach is what happened in the comments, which is try to help the OP to write a good question. This will actually probably resolve the question because by the time they produce sample code and explain what they have tried they will have figured out the answer themselves. Answering the question as it is does not either help the OP learn to write good question or learn Python. – Elin Feb 2 at 10:57
  • 2
    What I find crazy is all those downvoters who go it to -15 couldn't find more deserving questions to downvote, -5 is enough. – jpp Feb 2 at 10:58
  • 1
    @jpp, also think from the perspective of a student who has just started learning programming and goes to a tech community first time asked a bad question and got 15 downvotes thrown at, regardless whether those votes are just (they are), but how would one feel? – Indominus Feb 2 at 11:01
  • 2
    Over and over again on SO, people are told "voting is for indicators to the community" - but that stops being true below -3 (when the question drops off the front page). After that, it's just punishment, even if it's just psychological. – jpp Feb 2 at 11:18
  • 3
    @jpp No, it's not. It's no less true at -50, than at -3. That signal just gets stronger, exactly as it should. It also helps feed back into the system, so that we get less of those kinds of questions from that user. The point of downvotes is to signal that you believe content doesn't meet your standards. Who has voted on it prior to you is immaterial. – fbueckert Feb 2 at 17:07
  • 1
    @fbueckert, Signal to whom? Average Joe visitor? [not really, the question is sunk into the depths day1, get little visibility going forwards, gets no more answers, and will be auto-deleted]. The original poster? [certainly not, they are new users, frustrated and confused, cannot see beyond the -15]. You? [maybe it makes you sleep better you've chastised someone sufficiently so they will never return, even if they have good questions in the future]. – jpp Feb 2 at 17:10
  • 7
    @jpp And if it gets deleted, all the rep losses are removed, too. System working as intended. Original poster? Well, either they learn, or they're banned. System working as intended. Me? A post didn't meet my quality standards, so I downvoted. System working as intended. Don't vote based on what others have done. Vote on your personal judgement of the post's quality. – fbueckert Feb 2 at 17:12
  • 8
    @jpp You seem to miss that voting on anything other than the post is an abuse of the voting system. What the current score is at does not matter. That's why pity upvotes are such a crappy action. It's abusing the system to reflect something it was never meant to be used for. Same with not downvoting because, "It's low enough". That just means it'll never reflect it's true quality. – fbueckert Feb 2 at 17:13
  • 7
    "question should be closed (because it's a bad question) or answered (because we should be nice)" This is a false dilemma, and the endgame of it is the destruction of the site's usefulness for everybody who uses it as a source of information and solutions to their coding problems. – Josh Caswell Feb 2 at 18:43
  • 2
    @Jpp Quality doesn't matter for a deleted post. So why does it matter if it gets downvoted? You can't have both, "Oh, we're kicking them when they're down", and, "Quality doesn't matter for deleted posts". Either way, though, I think we're going off into the weeds here. Curation is curation. It's not mean, hostile, or anything in between. – fbueckert Feb 2 at 19:16
  • 4
    She may never come back to Stack Overflow again, you say this like it is a bad thing, it is not. I would go even further and say "I hope they reconsider a career in software development and decide to never write code again", because is is NOT the type of helpless/lazy/entitled people that we need as peers. – user10677470 Feb 3 at 0:36


Yes, because the primary goal of Stack Overflow is to build a repository of high-quality question and answer pairs, which are also helpful for future visitors and not only the OP. This is what made Stack Overflow successful. Questions in the sense of: "Please give me some hints on my homework" don't have any lasting value.


Of course we did. However, asking a question on Stack Overflow should be your last resort and not the very first one. If you start solving a problem, you are likely to have questions which have already been answered on the Internet or even Stack Overflow. This is why the community expects from users to do their own research before asking a question on Stack Overflow. There is no need to ask the same question over and over again if it can be answered by using Google etc. in a reasonable amount of time. And if you have no clue at all, then you should start reading a book or following a tutorial.

What really amounts to “be nice to new contributors”?

Downvoting and closing questions which are off-topic for Stack Overflow or which don't meet our quality standards are actions which are orthogonal to being nice. You can reject a request without insulting the requester or being patronizing to them.


What it amounts to, is saying nothing negative. If you say nothing, you can not by mistake say something "Not nice". If you want to be negative about a post, do some or all of these:

  • Down vote
  • Vote to close (if appropriate)
  • Flag for Moderator intervention (if appropriate)
  • Add a comment to with a link to a FAQ page on meta.

Note that homework questions are not, and never have been, off topic just because they are homework questions. Most are unwanted because they are some or all of

  • Unclear: the poster is so lacking in knowledge that they can not express precisely what their problem is.
  • Too Broad: the poster lacks the background knowledge to understand a reasonably short answer; they need a tutorial or mentor.
  • Too Broad: their effort so far is so riddled with errors they need several answers.
  • Unlikely to help others: other beginners will lack the breadth and depth of knowledge to understand how the question and answer relate to their superficially different, but fundamentally similar question.
  • Unlikely to help others: lacking basic debugging skills, their problem will not have been narrowed down in a way that emphasises the essence of the problem so others can easily recognise they have a similar problem.
  • Badly written: posted by a youth with unpracticed writing skills, little sense of professionalism, and no enthusiasm.

Do you want to drive away posters of crap homework questions, like I do? Several items of evidence suggest the best way to do this is to minimise your interaction with them. Any kind of answer or personalized comment can encourage them. So silently and ruthlessly down vote and vote to close.

  • 4
    On your last bullet: we can compensate for writing skills and assume the potential for professionalism but we can't fix lack of enthusiasm ... – rene Feb 2 at 10:18
  • 1
    Raedwald, I do like to drive away posters of crap homework questions like you do as those questions pollute or at least dilute the quality of the question pool. I understand all that, but I am just saying for the first (or first a few) time poster, should we lower standards, because they may not realize how the community works. Is piling 10 downvotes on a first timer too discouraging? Repeated offenders, of course, no argument there, they should be filtered out one way or another. – Indominus Feb 2 at 10:53
  • 8
    @Indominus A poster's skill level is irrelevant. All that matters is the quality of the post itself. If it doesn't meet your standards, downvote. If you run into multiple posts exhibiting the same issues, downvote. We don't care who posts it; all we care about is ensuring the content we have here is high quality. – fbueckert Feb 2 at 17:10
  • "Unlikely to help others" is not a close reason. That is part of the no-repro/typo close reason, but we don't close questions just because they were resolved in a manner unlikely to help future readers. The question has to be caused by a problem that can no longer be reproduced or a simple typographical error in order for the close reason to apply. – user4639281 Feb 3 at 1:31
  • @Tiny Giant I did not say it was a close reason. It is a reason for a question to be unwelcome. – Raedwald Feb 3 at 8:57
  • It definitely appears that you're saying that is a reason to close a question, given your first link named "Unlikely to help others" which links to a post that encourages the blatant abuse of said close reason, and the position in the list relative to two other close reasons. You sure that's the argument you want to go with? – user4639281 Feb 3 at 16:43

In "new contributor" you have "new" but you also have "contributor".

The question is just a homework dump without even an attempt to rephrase the questions

Please submit your solution as a python file. Make sure to comment on your code. For this assignment question work with the following array

this is just copy/paste of teacher assignment. It doesn't contribute to the site at all. Even some bad questions with attempts may contribute (unwillingly) with "creative" typos and such, but not here.

In those cases,

  • Don't answer. Even with "this is homework so I'm not going to give the solution but look into ..."
  • Downvote/vote to close.
  • Even if it's tempting, don't use harsh comments: that's the "be nice" thing

Being really nice would mean commenting something like:

Welcome to StackOverflow, please read [ask]. The purpose of this site is not to solve your homework without a minimum of research, blah blah,... so your question is off-topic.

(some may be tempted to help in comments, but doing so probably feeds those kind of questions since those askers desperately want help, comment or answers, so they'd be encouraged to come back)

  • 13
    First line sums it up rather nicely I think. This obsession with "nice" is turning into "nice at all costs" as shown in the question, forgetting the whole reason that SO exists. Crazy. – Lightness Races in Orbit Feb 2 at 17:55
  • 4
    "Welcome to StackOverflow, please read How to Ask.": No, please don't do that. The system itself already greets users and politely points them there. Repeating that is just noise. I suppose you might think it gives another chance to point the asker towards How to Ask. But once should be enough; anything else suggests they asker lacks the professionalism or enthusiasm we demand on this site. A harsh lesson in the form of downvotes and votes-to-close is what they need. – Raedwald Feb 2 at 19:52
  • 1
    @Raedwald: no, I don't think so. People don't read everything the first time. Sometimes, a redundant hint helps. – thb Feb 3 at 15:48

She may never come back to SO again

I'm not so hopeful. They will probably be back with more homework, likely under a different account to evade a question ban. Likely this isn't the first question of that entity, either.


No, we all didn't. Some of us were lucky to have the rare ability to read and understand the written guidance describing what Stack Overflow is, before hitting "post your question".

What really amounts to “be nice to new contributors”?

Getting such post deleted sooner, which prevents any further downvotes from being cast.

  • The "a different account" argument is really a good point, I guess that is a universal issue for all online activities. Otherwise, I am just thinking maybe new contributors should get a few protected chances to ask questions, it's the same to say gradually raising the standards. Those who keep posting bad/lazy questions should be filtered out of course. – Indominus Feb 2 at 2:38
  • 10
    @Indominus That would make sense if the goal of Stack Overflow was to help each user solve their specific problem. This isn't the case; SO is meant to be a repository of questions and answers useful to other users as well, and such has some quality standards. When we drop the standards for new contributors we turn into a personal help desk instead. It would also set a bad example for other new contributors. – Modus Tollens Feb 2 at 5:52
  • @ModusTollens, I see your point, that does make sense. Although while encouraging more people to use the site by offering them help could benefit the eventual goal of a knowledge repository, it only does so indirectly. But that makes me think whether users with reputation in mere hundreds or thousands actually add to this knowledge repository goal, or could we just be beneficiaries of mighty Gods (say, 100K+) occasionally deviating from their real goal to offer us some personal help? – Indominus Feb 2 at 6:32
  • 2
    @Indominus I am not sure I understand the mighty Gods part... I see users of all rep amount offering help on improving questions all the time, but often their comments are ignored. – Modus Tollens Feb 2 at 6:34
  • 1
    @ModusTollens, I guess I just always considered SO a place to solve each other's specific problems, not much from the perspective of being a question repository. Now I am wondering whether all my questions are just junks to the repository in the eyes of "mighty Gods", just like those newbies questions' seem to me. – Indominus Feb 2 at 6:42
  • 2
    @Indominus I don't know who you mean by mighty Gods, but I am positive your questions are not seen as junk. As long as your question can help others in the future, there is no problem with it. – Modus Tollens Feb 2 at 6:45

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .