I definitely believe this is a problem. I recommended this site to my sister recently. She is an inexperienced programmer, and her project director switched them from Visual Studio to Borland mid-project. She has a master's degree in mathematics and has only taken 1-2 college level programming classes, but she has been added onto a programming project as one of her tours in the entry level program of her department. She was struggling with some of the differences between the two development environments. She did find some help on certain Borland sites, but shte had been largely at a loss for some of the errors she was running into. That's when I sent her here.

I've been following Stack Overflow since Jeff Atwood started talking about it on Coding Horror. I have to confess I am more lurker/observer than anything else. I was extremely pleased at how quickly questions were answered, and she joined up on my recommendation.

Her first question was almost immediately attacked as being homework, while also being voted down and criticized for its format. While some of the reasoning (expect the homework stuff) was accurate, the method in which it was presented was wholly inappropriate, especially for a new user. She was almost immediately turned off by the responses, and felt like she should return to her forum resources.

Thankfully, a few long time users came by, ANSWERED HER QUESTION, and encouraged her to keep participating. They redeemed both her opinion and my own about the site. There was a night and day difference between how the users, who basically took the same actions in showing her a better way to ask the question, responded.

While I definitely believe we need to be using up/down votes as they are intended, if members can't be respectfully helpful to new users, we need some new way of communicating the proper way to use the website.

I definitely believe this is a problem. I recommended this site to my sister recently. She is an inexperienced programmer, and her project director switched them from Visual Studio to Borland mid-project. She has a master's degree in mathematics and has only taken 1-2 college level programming classes, but she has been added onto a programming project as one of her tours in the entry level program of her department. She was struggling with some of the differences between the two development environments. She did find some help on certain Borland sites, but she had been largely at a loss for some of the errors she was running into. That's when I sent her here.

I've been following Stack Overflow since Jeff Atwood started talking about it on Coding Horror. I have to confess I am more lurker/observer than anything else. I was extremely pleased at how quickly questions were answered, and she joined up on my recommendation.

Her first question was almost immediately attacked as being homework, while also being voted down and criticized for its format. While some of the reasoning (except the homework stuff) was accurate, the method in which it was presented was wholly inappropriate, especially for a new user. She was almost immediately turned off by the responses, and felt like she should return to her forum resources.

Thankfully, a few long time users came by, ANSWERED HER QUESTION, and encouraged her to keep participating. They redeemed both her opinion and my own about the site. There was a night and day difference between how the users, who basically took the same actions in showing her a better way to ask the question, responded.

While I definitely believe we need to be using up/down votes as they are intended, if members can't be respectfully helpful to new users, we need some new way of communicating the proper way to use the website.

I definitely believe this is a problem. I recommended this site to my sister recently. She is an inexperienced programmer, and her project director switched them from Visual Studio to Borland mid-project. She has a master's degree in mathematics, and has only taken 1-2 college level programming classes, but has been added onto a programming project as one of her tours in the entry level program of her department. She was struggling with some of the differences between the two development environments. She did find some help on certain Borland sites, but had been largely at a loss for some of the errors she was running into. That's when I sent her here.

I've been following SO since Jeff started talking about it on coding horror. I have to confess I am more lurker/observer than anything else. I was extremely pleased at how quickly questions were answered, and she joined up on my recommendation.

Her first question was almost immediately attacked as being homework, while also being voted down and criticized for its format. While some of the reasoning (expect the homework stuff) was accurate, the method in which it was presented was wholly inappropriate, especially for a new user. She was almost immediately turned off by the responses, and felt like she should return to her forum resources.

Thankfully, a few long time users came by, ANSWERED HER QUESTION, and encouraged her to keep participating. They redeemed both her opinion and my own about the site. There was a night and day difference between how the users, who basically took the same actions in showing her a better way to ask the question, responded.

While I definitely believe we need to be using up/down votes as they are intended, if members can't be respectfully helpful to new users, we need some new way of communicating the proper way to use the website.

I definitely believe this is a problem. I recommended this site to my sister recently. She is an inexperienced programmer, and her project director switched them from Visual Studio to Borland mid-project. She has a master's degree in mathematics and has only taken 1-2 college level programming classes, but she has been added onto a programming project as one of her tours in the entry level program of her department. She was struggling with some of the differences between the two development environments. She did find some help on certain Borland sites, but shte had been largely at a loss for some of the errors she was running into. That's when I sent her here.

I've been following Stack Overflow since Jeff Atwood started talking about it on Coding Horror. I have to confess I am more lurker/observer than anything else. I was extremely pleased at how quickly questions were answered, and she joined up on my recommendation.

Her first question was almost immediately attacked as being homework, while also being voted down and criticized for its format. While some of the reasoning (expect the homework stuff) was accurate, the method in which it was presented was wholly inappropriate, especially for a new user. She was almost immediately turned off by the responses, and felt like she should return to her forum resources.

Thankfully, a few long time users came by, ANSWERED HER QUESTION, and encouraged her to keep participating. They redeemed both her opinion and my own about the site. There was a night and day difference between how the users, who basically took the same actions in showing her a better way to ask the question, responded.

While I definitely believe we need to be using up/down votes as they are intended, if members can't be respectfully helpful to new users, we need some new way of communicating the proper way to use the website.