Do's and Don'ts of Stack Overflow
07 Sep 2022
Stack overflow, a website whose main purpose is to find answers to questions regarding anything coding related, ask help with coding related problems, and to answer questions a user has regarding coding. With stack overflow, it is important that the question being asked has not only enough info regarding the problem but is also well written and formatted so that its easy for someone to answer. Writing a question like this has a much higher chance of it being answered rather than ignored.
A good question I found on stack overflow is a question regarding the placement of “script” tags in HTML markup. The question itself is very technical while at the same time very easy to understand. It is also posted in the correct forum and highlights the tags so that they are easy to see and not lost in the questions itself. And while there is no code in the question, it does link to a similar question with code that is correctly added into the question making it east for anyone to copy and paste it into a compiler. Because the question is well formatted, it was well received based on the number of upvotes and was given a well formatted answer. Stack Overflow
A bad question I found on stack overflow is a question regarding the response time of a call in the user’s code. The user explains that the longer the code was running the response time of call “respondDecisionTaskCompleted” was getting slower and slower. The formatting for this question is an example of what not to do. There is no code for anyone to try see what the problem is and it’s very hard to understand due to lack of context. Because of this, there is no answer with a user even saying that there’s nothing to be done since no code has been provided. Stack Overflow
To conclude, while there is no such thing as a stupid question, bad question do exist when they are formulated incorrectly. In order to prevent this and get an answer, make sure your question follows rules such as not posting it in the wrong forum, ask in a very elementary way, and always provide code that can be easily copied and run. Following these simple rules will almost always guarantee an answer.