33
Empathy...
I am not necessarily a good example of a good reviewer, I have been the 'victim' of many reviews, and I have given a lot too. I am often tactless, and pedantic. I blame that on the fact that I am South African born.... but I have since moved to Canada, and culture here is much more sensitive to peoples' feelings. I'm sorry.
I have had to train ...
26
Be impersonal
The goal of code review is to improve the quality of the code (and to produce shared knowledge that will contribute to the quality of code written in the future), not to evaluate the worth of the programmer.
A reviewer can make it less likely that someone will take the review personally by directing criticism at the code, not at the person. ...
23
There is no simple answer to this question.
On one hand, Code Review requires real code. Anytime you redact something for the sake of posting it, something is lost in the process.
Different people react differently to profanity. Should sed -i -e 's/f.ck/hug/i' be applied to the Linux kernel? That's debatable, and therefore it is a valid topic to be ...
20
This ought to be an interesting discussion. Let me pitch in a few things. Here is what I picked up from your answer, at a glance.
It is honest, which is good.
It points out a bug, which is also good.
It doesn't really offer else much in the scope of improving the code, aside from pointing out that it is unclear what the code does.
I've read quite a bit ...
16
Of course you may! That is, after all, the point of Creative Commons licensing — that you are free to learn from others' work and remix content into your own creations. If it's a close derivative work, be sure to abide by the terms of the license. If your work is just loosely inspired by something you saw, then attribution probably isn't required, but use ...
16
There's nothing wrong with self-answering a question. There isn't even anything wrong with accepting your own answer if you review your own code and provide new insight that others haven't.
The problem is when your selfie is not actually a review. If you just implemented the advices given in one or more other answers, that's not a review. As such, it's not ...
15
Don't get me wrong, there is nothing bad with self-answering a question. There isn't even anything wrong with accepting your own answer if you review your own code with distinct points not stated in other answers. The problem comes in when you only implement the advice given to you by other answers into your own answer and choose to accept that instead.
I ...
13
Treat Code Review users the same way you would treat any other contributor to your open-source project. For me, I would expect a mention in the checkin comment (you use version control, right?). If you have a bug database or a detailed changelog file, a mention there might also be appropriate. Attribution might look like:
Fixed buggy frobnicate() ...
12
You could go for a humourous approach. Instead of embedding “explicit” words in the code, you could embed “dirty” words.
# Explicit words replaced with "dirty" words during code review.
explicit_words = [
"stain", "stained", "staining",
"dust", "dusty", # Note: "dusting" would be a clean word
"soil", "soiled", "soiling",
"...
10
This specific question is directed toward 200_success, but I think the point you are raising is independent of that.
Let's break down your question in to what I think are the relevant parts:
Is there a concept of a super-mod in Code Review - do we have a 'hierarchy'?
Is there a policy from the mods for closing/reopening things that the community is not ...
10
Presumably, reviewers want to know that their suggestions were useful.
Indeed! As with all Stack Exchange sites, useful answers receive upvotes from readers. If you haven't done that already, give that review your upvote, and mark your question as answered by giving a checkmark to that awesome answer. If you have >50 rep and more to say than just "Thanks!" ...
9
In this scenario I think that specific user actually misunderstood site policies, See the screenshot below.
If it really is a misunderstanding as he claims we should forgive him, If he follow site policies from now on, and do not repeat the same mistake again he was probably saying the truth.
I suggested the user to participate in the chat as well.
If I ...
9
It's not really rude as such — you don't speak down to or insult the person — but I think it could be improved.
When you're trying to correct a behavior, it's important to explain:
What the person did that's wrong;
Why the behavior is wrong;
What they can do to correct the behavior.
Your comment only touches on the third point, so without ...
9
The fact of the matter is that this is the third off topic question posted by Leon.
Without even try to help Leon to improve his question by posting some advices in the comments.
This is simply not true. It's not like we didn't try to explain it in several comments. In fact, I tried my best to provide some helpful suggestions in one of these comments:
...
8
General remarks
First of all, I appreciate the feedback. While good moderators can strengthen a site, bad ones (whether deliberate or unwitting) can be toxic. If any community member is unhappy with a moderator action, I'd much rather know about it.
Second, moderators do make mistakes. Community members do too — sometimes five of them together. ...
8
Once the answer was posted here, it wasn't really OP's to withhold
from the world anymore. It belongs to the community and Stack Exchange
as well as OP, per the CC-By-SA license.
This bit right here...while it may be officially the case, for whatever reason (I doubt it has to do with why you ask this question), it's not something I would go out of my ...
8
It's impossible to assign an absolute and correct indicator of quality to contributions, and their various facets, such as the value of the specific recommendations, and the delivery of the message.
And if you cannot stick a value on it,
you cannot claim correlations with other values.
I think that means we can only talk about feelings here,
and I'm not sure ...
6
I don't agree with you.
The ternary in a ternary is hard to read, and your option to miss brackets can and does lead to bugs.
Both probably are in style guides, but both are definite problems with your program.
I don't know much C#, I definitely don't know its style guide, but I'd definitely agree with Heslacher.
Things such as use TitleCase rather than ...
6
I don't think your comment is rude. That being said if you wanted to soften it a bit and be more explicit about the "call to action" for the user, you could word it along these lines:
Welcome to Code Review! Your question title in its current form is
ambiguous. Because we want to better understand your question so we
can review it, please consider ...
5
Basically, the gist of this is, we should be having discussions on the meta before overturning a close vote on a question that has received no edits since the close vote, right? At the barest of minimums, the re-opening moderator needs to leave a comment on the question explaining why the close reason voted on doesn't apply to the question.
I don't think we ...
5
Speaking as a private contributor, rather than as a moderator…
Our mission is to review code or to have our code reviewed. Any other activity is a distraction from that goal.
Of course, some overhead is unavoidable, to ensure that the community is aligned and happy.
Closing off-topic questions is necessary to maintain quality. However, open questions ...
5
In recent discussions about Low Quality answers in the Low Quality Queue it was said that
a code dump is not a review, and therefore not an acceptable answer.
By Mat's Mug
Meaning that the answer should still be a review of the code originally posted code, if it is not a review then it is not a good answer.
If the selfie is a code dump, it is not a ...
5
This is a good question, and I think you made all the right moves with your actions:
You left the explicit words out;
You asked a question on Meta as to whether they're acceptable or not;
So, let's discuss that.
Are explicit words allowed in a programs source code?
This is the first question you ask: are explicit words allowed? That's a very relevant ...
4
I have requested that an answer be undeleted, but that was because I was the Question Asker and I thought that the answer had really useful information in it that I wanted to use in my code, and I thought that it deserved up voting and the like.
It is really a case by case thing, depending on the circumstances of the deletion and the quality of the post, ...
3
How about:
Welcome to Code Review! We would appreciate if you edited the title of your question to describe the function of your code. There are at least 2 advantages to this: (1) It will get more eyes on your question, and (2) it will help reviewers provide a better review that is specific to your code in context.
3
Leave open. Nearly always. (*) If the OP claims, it supports Unicode and it doesn't... it's a bug w.r.t. their claims, but it doesn't mean it's a bug w.r.t. the specification. Maybe the claim was just too bold.
If the Unicode support was the main point of the question, this would change the situation.
The point of a real CR is to get feedback and to get it ...
3
To answer your question; I like my moderators active and involved, in all aspects.
That said, (and perhaps this should be a feature request), if a mod single-handedly undoes a close/open decision by the community then I would like to see that in my inbox if I cast one of the 5 votes.
3
Many things influence how many votes you receive. The biggest factor is probably how many people read the question; if you choose to review code written in "minority" languages, you'll almost certainly get fewer votes than if you're reviewing C, C++ or Python.
Also, for much of the population of Stack Exchange (I think we're over-represented in Europe and ...
2
This question dates back from CR's debut, and it being unanswered on the front page is just weird. Nevertheless, it's a good question so here's my input.
Code Review Questions on StackOverflow
These questions ought to be migrated over here, as mentioned in a comment. While there is no "official" migration route from SO to CR while the site is in beta, when ...
1
You post your code on this site, and you get feedback. Just like anything else you read on the Internet, some of the feedback will be valuable, and some of it, frankly, will be garbage. For that matter, the same caveat would apply if you asked a friend or colleague to review your code.
To some extent, each of us has a personal style. You couldn't ...
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