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?
homework
tag, esp if the question obviously comes from something like a textbook