These days whenever I’m stuck doing a challenge I started to tend to look for questions that have already been asked/answered so that I can get a perspective for my own challenge. It’s been very helpful and I’ve been able to get answers to my problems quicker this way.
I was thinking about having that implemented into the “Ask for help” section of the challenge. Something like “Related questions to this challenge” before posting a new question. I believe this has some benefits :
The forum won’t have duplicate questions for the topic at hand.
The asker will get his/her questions answered more quickly.
No not really. Right when you click “Ask for Help” after passing the “have you used the read-search-ask method section”, It just shows your code and a “Tell us what’s happening”. No suggestions.
The “Search” part of “Read, Search, Ask” is going to places like the forum and searching for an answer. If you haven’t tried using the search bar of the FCC forum, you haven’t really tried reading and searching before asking.
Yeah but not many people do. Especially for the HTML/CSS part (At least at the time I was active in FCC previously) there were many repetitive questions on the same challenges. One way or the other you will learn how to Google and search docs but while in FCC it could be easier to have that feature.
I don’t really know a better way that we can force campers to look for an answer before asking a question. I’d be in favor of one, because it’s true that we answer the same question several times a day, but we can’t really compete with the impatience that many people feel when they’re first learning.
I was thinking of adding a page when the “Ask for help” is clicked. It would show questions directly related to the challenge the camper is working on. They can browse through it and then they can decide if their question is not listed then they ask. Kind of like the way StackOverflow does it.
That would get in the way of pre-populating a forum post with a template though (including the camper’s current code). I’m not sure that people would want that tradeoff.
When you click “Ask For Help” it starts creating a topic for you with a title, the correct category, a template for you to fill out, your (formatted) code, and a link to the challenge.
Yeah that would not be the case in the solution I’m suggesting. When you cllick “Ask for help” it should take you the related questions asked before you and then they can view the answers and suggestions given for each post (for as many they wish to see) and then finally if they don’t think they have found what they are looking for they can generate the template to ask their question specifically.
From the perspective of the persons offering help, a nice feature for the pre-populated post would be if it automatically added a link to the challenge in question.
Normally I only check the code to see if there are syntax anomalies. And I point that out, some optimizations along the way and that’s it. If the question is blind the answer can’t be any clearer.
