At what level does "do X for me" become off-topic?

Question

I've recently been hanging around this site because I enjoy problem solving on linux and learn heaps from seeing how other peoples solutions. I'm happy to pitch in to solve others problems, however -here more than other SE sites- I see questions that make me want to close my browser and walk away.

I think there are some things which are productive for neither the asking party nor the answering. A case in point would be today's "Can you write an awk script for me?" (Note: editor changed title to something less provocative).

I have no objection to writing scripts for people as proofs of concept or editing real code to help people get on track. What irked me about this question was that it was clearly a homework problem aimed at getting the student to read up on the documentation and understand the available options. It didn't help that the user has a history of asking homework questions, by which I've been bothered before. It presented nothing that would not be covered in any basic awk guide. There was no real-world application to engage or cause to further. I felt like somebody was trying to cheat me out of my time and wasn't even going to walk away having learned anything. If they wanted to learn they could read a man page first and then ask a specific question. There wasn't even room for people to present creative solutions with other software because the problem had a requirement of using awk.

I say that makes for boring clutter on a QnA site.

Should I suck it up and move on?

Should I tag them myself as homework (or doitforme :P) so I can ignore the whole lot of them?

Should we be a little tighter in our on-topic criteria?

Answer 1

I certainly defer to the others here who are active participants -- but our general philosophy is to heavily favor answerers.

We feel that the world is awash in questions, but not answers. Answers are the real unit of work in any Q&A system. Therefore, the only logical thing to do is to maximize the happiness and enjoyment of answerers.

If this means aggressively closing unworthy or uninteresting questions, so be it. Without a community of people willing to answer questions, it really doesn't matter if there are questions at all, does it?

Answer 2

Regarding homework, see this previous meta question. I recommend answering obvious homework questions with hints rather than full answers.

If you see a homework assignment which is missing some bits or badly translated, don't hesitate to close it as “not a real question”. (Technically the fact that it's homework doesn't change whether it's NaRQ, but I'm less likely to be lenient on a badly-asked homework question than on someone's practical problem where it might not be obvious to the asker which error messages or configuration file contents are important.)

Regarding the specific question you link to, this isn't this guy's first post. He's been using multiple accounts, but he doesn't bother to disguise his assignments (I think they all have MSc stream somewhere). He's mostly NaRQ material, but this question looks ok and deserves a hint.

If you find that answering a question would be too much effort for an answer (that's not specific to homework questions), don't hesitate to say so. Just write an answer explaining general methodology (e.g. “This is a job for awk, here's a small script that meets requirement 1, and use for (i in arr) {…} for requirement 2”). If the asker insists on getting a full solution (“plzsendmetehcodez”, ignore them).

Regarding basic questions, don't forget that what's obvious to you may not be obvious to the asker. If the asker is an obvious beginner, a pointer to the specific place in the documentation as well as a short, commented example can be very helpful.