I still dont get whats up with this constant pollution of the programmers forum with threads like "Bank", "Cop Sirens" and crap like that.

Really, this shouldnt be tolerated or this great subsection will end up being useless, just like the teams forum.

Quote from BurnOut69 :

I still dont get whats up with this constant pollution of the programmers forum with threads like "Bank", "Cop Sirens" and crap like that.

Really, this shouldnt be tolerated or this great subsection will end up being useless, just like the teams forum.

They're tolerated because they're not in an area which has any value for a programmer looking for non-trivial help.

The Insim/Program request was created for the precise purpose of allowing this "crap". All other reasonable and non-trivial requests go in the main forum, or get moved there when I notice them.

This simple segregation gives the best of both worlds; The useful bit to programmers is more easily searchable than it was previously (because you can do a decent search ignoring this requests subforum), and program requests and very basic help is "tolerated" which has nurtured a few new programmers which are coming for the fore.

How you feel this is at all relevant for this thread is beyond me, however. I hope you feel this is acceptable. If not may I suggest that you just ignore this part of the forum. No one is making you read it. It was also made expressly at several people's moanings, including my own. It's working rather nicely for everyone else, but yourself it seems.

Karl,

I still think this is a programmer forum (including all its subforums), and people at least should be looking for specific help on how to do this or that. Asking for "an insim to open the bank" sounds like a joke no matter if it shows in a proper search or not. Ask for a memory structure to hold user names and credit and I'll be the first to answer, but a "bank"??

I mean, look at the threads made by this Bremskiller18akaHeinz guy...do you honestly think thats the purpose of this section?

Take this as constructive criticism, I can appreciate the job of the mod team, specially here. Its just I find over the top asking for certain things.

I've moved the posts out into here, for obvious reasons. I'd be interested in potentially drawing a little more attention to this, perhaps.

Quote from BurnOut69 :

I still think this is a programmer forum (including all its subforums), and people at least should be looking for specific help on how to do this or that. Asking for "an insim to open the bank" sounds like a joke no matter if it shows in a proper search or not. Ask for a memory structure to hold user names and credit and I'll be the first to answer, but a "bank"??

I agree, but there's a line that needed to be drawn prior to myself being a mod, and erasing then re-drawing that line now could be considered equally as irresponsible. The way I would've dealt with things and how they are dealt with are potentially 2 different things. I agree that there should be a "if you want to program, go and learn properly" mentality.

However, the issue is not only with allowing these requests, but also how people respond to them. I have no real right to vet or prevent responses. If people continue to answer and post complete code for people to copy and paste, then the lessons are not going to be learnt. Short of preventing people from doing what they want (i.e. by restricting their freedom), there's not much the mods can really do at the end of the day aside from making things easier for others. We've tried to acheive this by splitting off this sort of stuff.

From a purely personal point of view I try and endorse this by providing limited, basic code, or just by providing conceptual answers, and I'm a firm believer that this is the best way to learn to program here. I truly believe that the LFS community is bad at teaching people to program, but the only reason for that is because the community doesn't cater for this. There are others that do and we should all be pushing people to those instead.

Quote from BurnOut69 :

Take this as constructive criticism, I can appreciate the job of the mod team, specially here.

Don't worry, I do (take it as constructive) Don't take anything I say personally; I do swear a lot, but it's just how I express myself

Karl, speaking from experience too (learning PHP). Someone providing me with a concept answer, rather than giving me a function to do it, or copy and pasting code teaches a lot more, and when encountering a problem in the future, gives the capability to draw upon earlier code and figure stuff out.

Just my opinion. I think (honestly) just entire code dumps should be banned from here, except in a proper place (random PHP function dump thread). Maybe to prevent redundant questions, have a "[LANGUAGE HERE] code dump thread", locked where if a moderator sees a block of code that people have claimed to work, throw it in there, with no warranty, stating simply what it (should) do and people have verified it.

Not the best way, but could prevent "OMG BANK!" threads.

While conceptual answers are ideally what should be provided, they don't really help a lot of the people who are posting here. In my view the majority of posters don't really want to learn how to program, they just want to have their own cruise server, and copying & pasting code is a necessary evil to achieve that. Until someone makes a free cruise server that works without having to edit code, this sort of stuff is unlikely to stop. As TAA says, you can just ignore those posts, or as I do, the forum.

Let's not forget that, like DarkTimes said, the people posting these threads normally refuse to do the leg work. Simple as that. They, indeed, just want the code so they can say they have it. For the most part I also ignore that forum, and most other forums on this board as they do not serve my propose. In fact, I am finding myself spending less and less time here as the community and this particular forum falls from the grace it once had. I also fell that I am partly to blame for this.

On a more personal level, I very much started off programming as one of these trolls, but I also had the intent to learn from the code I was given. I was very much like a child in his/her first few years of life asking questions about everything, wanting the results / answer now. But that's part of growing up, as well as part of the learning processes. Indeed I am going about it the same way with the Regular Expressions functions in PHP. Yeah, I am getting the answers I need and then can use, but I am also learning how to deal with that data set given an expression and the circumstances set forth from that given set of data.

Please note that the following paragraph is not meant to be directed at people here who have already established them selfs, this is much more directed at some of the newer faces.
I will say that the troll personality is not true of all of the people on here, some do come with the intent to learn, and thus grow. Those people deserve the time and effort as they can greatly benefit the community with time and some nurturing. Everyone can in fact learn to program, but I only really want to teach the people who want to learn. Forgive me for my laziness but, I like you ... a programmer, laziness is in my blood . People you force to learn, don't have the same enthusiasm for the craft as people who want to do it. That's why it's juts not fun to teach them.

Given the PHPInSim model, with the 'core' and then having plugins that carry out the dirty work, I think that it would provide an excellent environment for learning how to program. I have just lost time patience with the community to work on it and the will to continue work on such a time consuming project when I have other tasks at hand from the ambulance core and my EMT-CC final coming up in the next 20 days, plus all of the clinical time and practical hours I must put in before I am even allowed to sit for the test.

Edit: I'd like to take this post to thank the Mods for their hard work, you really do a wonderful job. I'd also like to say sorry for being such a pain in the arse from time to time. I don't mean to, some times my posts just come out that way. Sorry.

Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish he will eat for a life time.

Problem here is too many guys are giving out free fish like its fast food and then become annoyed when they get asked for more fish. It's self abusive and just keeps the non-programmers fed so they keep fishing.

I applaud the guys like TAA giving out psuedo code and one liner fixes.

Cya later.

Quote from JasonJ :

Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish he will eat for a life time.

Teach a man to teach men to fish, and the whole community eats well.

Until you over-fish the river...

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

Just my opinion. I think (honestly) just entire code dumps should be banned from here, except in a proper place (random PHP function dump thread). Maybe to prevent redundant questions, have a "[LANGUAGE HERE] code dump thread", locked where if a moderator sees a block of code that people have claimed to work, throw it in there, with no warranty, stating simply what it (should) do and people have verified it.

Not the best way, but could prevent "OMG BANK!" threads.

Nice idea, but I'm not convinced that should be the job of the entire community. I'm happy to do that, if that's what's needed, however the various applications which have a lot of swappable features might benefit from becoming plugin powered. It's not a very speedy idea, but considering I'm primarily thinking about the .NET orientated stuff, I don't think it's really a factor. My only concern is that it falls on the shoulders of one or two people. In this instance I'm thinking dougie and/or mcgas001.

Quote from Bob Smith :

Until you over-fish the river...

I agree, there are too many (badly run and managed) cruise servers, for cruisers, now. But that's how people want to play, then so be it

Yeah, That's the issue that I see is that everyone seems to want to get to the final point without going through all the caveat bits in between which is annoying (atleast to me, who wants to learn how to do things).

Even when I screw up, and get help from someone, I want to know what I did wrong, which other people don't really seem to want (atleast here with the cruise nubs).

Although the code dump thread could work, but only if it was moderated (give a few dedicated and trustworthy people ownership of this section to keep it tidy?) and people were willing to share and go about it the proper way. I'd be willing to help with it, even though I might not be "teh l33t coderz", I have enough of an understanding to not be totally useless.

@Dygear : I need to now look at your PHPInsim again.