Message Board Guidelines

General principles

I want our message board (piazza) to be a friendly place where we can help each other out. To make sure this vision is realized as best as it can be, please help me in observing the following guidelines.

1. When asking questions, perform due diligence first. That is, make sure you’ve done a bit of work to try to figure things out on your own before taking other people’s time and attention. At a minimum, make sure you’ve
   • done the assigned reading
   • searched piazza for similar questions
2. This specializes the above, but I think deserves special mention: read the project READMEs carefully! They were written carefully and deserve to be read with care.
3. When answering questions, be polite, keeping in mind that none of us are omniscient. Try not to say things that will make others feel dumb.
4. In general, try to assume your peers have good intentions. Just because an answer is terse doesn’t mean it’s intended to be rude.
5. If you’ve asked a question, be sure to follow up, and please mark the question as “resolved” once you have a satisfactory answer.

NOTE: Your instructors are not exempt from any of these guidelines. If you think I’m being a jerk at some point, please let me know.

When asking about git

If you are having issues with git, please be sure to include the following in your post:

• The output of git status.
• The exact command you were trying to run, and the exact message detailing what went wrong.¹

Images vs text

TL;DR text makes searches work, so include text in posts.

More specifically:

• Prefer posting text instead of images of text when possible.
• If an image is helpful and it contains text (like an error message) please type out at least some of the text or error message and include that in your post. This will help others with the same problem when they search.

Formatting source code

When posting code, please use the “code” formatting, or if using the plain text editor, place your code in <pre> tags. This preserves indentation and makes it much easier to read for others! You can also use <md> to type markdown.