Code Review Clippy

Question

A while back, y'all asked for some warnings for folks asking questions here: What would Clippy say?

After thorough review (mostly by animuson & JNat), we've determined that the following warnings can be implemented, based on question title matches:

\b((do(ing)?\s+this)|(this\s+(\w+\s)? code)|me|my|I)\b

Avoid generic terms; please tell us exactly what your code does!

This matches over 1% of the last 10,000 closed/deleted titles. All the rest of the expressions struggle to match this combined - I mention this because even if these warnings help in the cases where they show up, they're not gonna show up that often.

^(How|Can|Should|Would|Need)\b.+\??$

Titles that contain a specific question are generally inappropriate for Code Review.

\b(wrong|incorrect)\b

Code that produces incorrect results is off-topic for Code Review.

\b(better|improve(ment)?|improving)\b

Please ensure that the title states what your code does. Seeking improvement on all aspects of the code is implied for Code Review questions, so specific concerns need not be mentioned in the title.

\b(short(en|er|ening)?|optimi(se|ze|sation|zation)|efficien(t|ce))\b

Efficiency and optimization are implied for every question on Code Review. The title should simply state the task accomplished by the code.

\b(refactor(ing)?|avoid|too many|need|DRY)\b

Please ensure that the title states what your code does, and reviewers will point out what needs to be improved.

\b(statements|loops|else|catch)\b

Please ensure that the title states what your code does. If the code is a purely generic example that has no specific purpose, then the question would be off-topic for Code Review.

I've gone ahead and turned these on. Enjoy!

Answer 1

Yay! Thanks!

Just one note, if I would see this as an entirely new user:

Titles that contain a specific question are generally inappropriate for Code Review.

I would be very confused. If I would come here from other SE sites, this goes against how most other SE sites work. I think it would be good to specify what we do want here. Something like:

Titles that contain a specific question are generally inappropriate for Code Review as we all want to improve our code in some way. Please tell us what your code does in the title.

Answer 2

That's awesome!!

Thanks a million! This will certainly help improve question quality on the site in a major way.

The only tiny little quibble I have is that it seems the forecolor for the x button and message text were somehow inverted, which makes the message a bit hard to read, and ironically puts subliminal emphasis on, well, the "dismiss" button:

Expected

Actual

As rendered in my Chrome 58.0.3029.110 (64-bit) desktop browser:

Answer 3

Would it be possible to also add the ability to detect code-only posts. I don't know how common they are, but this question is a fairly good piece of code to review, but doesn't contain any text about what it's supposed to do, the motivation for writing it, or anything at all about it. There's already a close vote on it. I hate to see a good question get closed when a simple reminder could have prevented it.

Answer 4

I will just suggest a small improvement on one regular expression.

Currently, you have this:

\b(wrong|incorrect)\b

To display the following message:

Code that produces incorrect results is off-topic for Code Review.

But, I propose the following (indented for readability):

\b(
    (?:(?:help|can(?:'t|\s*not)
    |pl(?:ease|z))\s+)fix
    |(?:not\s+|in)correct
    |wrong
    |throws?\s+exceptions?
    |broken
    |breaks?
    |(:?does|can?)(?:n't|\s*not)\s+(?:work|output|display|present|run|compile|open|show|match)
    |(?:(?:has|can|causes?)\s+(?:(?:performace|size|memory|display)\s+)?)(?:issue|problem|erro)s?
)\b

This should match things like:

My code doesn't compile
Can't display picture
Can't open file
This code doesn't work on IE6
Help fix exception being thrown
This code causes problems displaying PI
Broken display when running program on 800x600

This may also generate some false positives. Possibly far more than the over-simplified version you present.

This matches, possibly, some common titles when asking questions about broken code, but also matches some that may show up in the future (possibly rarely).