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Just as a heads-up, there's been a recent discussion about how to handle experimental open-ended questions that are asking for a code review on Stack Overflow. I bounced between this community and Stack Overflow doing some research. I even posted an answer on this question here , but it has 14 down-votes and won't show up on the home page here on meta, so it's likely buried. Long story short: due…
Standard advice for answers is that they should contain at least one insightful observation. Does that standard hold for self-answers? We do advise askers that one option for showing how their code has been improved is to post it as an answer; is it necessary to write something like "This is what the code looks like when I've applied the suggestions by userXYZ", or is that implicit? If we do have…
I was browsing questions and randomly found one related to my interests: Two dimensional gaussian image generator in C++ I noticed that it was a follow-up to two of the user's previous questions: Two dimensional bicubic interpolation implementation in C++ and Two dimensional gaussian image generator in C , which in turn were follow-ups to even older questions. That got me curious: How far did it…
Once upon a time, I zoomed the LaTeX output font size to 125%. Now, I want to set the zoom level back to 100% but there is no such option in the list anymore.
Before posting my question I did my due diligence and read the following Help Center pages: What topics can I ask about here? and What types of questions should I avoid asking? However after posting my question, A one-liner to produce 1,2,3 in one Sqlite column , I was met with downvotes and my post closed. Pointing to the the meta post My question was closed as being off-topic. What are my…
On my question War of dots: simple RTS war game in python , I placed a bounty for 50 rep, then rewarded it to one of the answers. When the first bounty was 3 days from expiry, I got the message notifying me on the fact, perfectly normal stuff. I never observed the message telling me it was one day from expiry because I rewarded it before then. Immediately after rewarding the first, I placed…
It’s that time of the year again! As we bid farewell to the year that's concluded and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year . As most of you here might be aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web: We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating,…
11 years have passed since I signed up on Code Review. More than 14 years since I've signed up on Stack Overflow. I've... seen things. Learned things. Some of those things, I'm glad I saw and learned. A lot of things actually. People I helped and people who helped me. Some of those memories I'll cherish for a long time to come. Other things, I could've gone without. Especially after I picked up my…
I got this message when trying to add web-extensions tag to my question Streaming messages for Chrome MV3 Web extensions The tag [web-extensions] is too similar to [firefox-webextensions]. If you think this new tag should be allowed, discuss it on meta. Web extensions span far beyond just Firefox browser. There's Chromium, Chrome, Chrome for Testing, Opera, Brave, Edge, Firefox, and several other…
As of today (November 4, 2025), all code blocks on Stack Overflow have a “Copy” button. From Results of the October 2025 Community Asks Sprint: copy button for code blocks, and more on Meta: As of today, users will be able to copy blocks of code directly from posts on Stack Overflow, by clicking the new Copy button in the top right corner of the code block. [...] We can also enable this feature on…
There are several meta questions plus the help center making it clear that questions must provide real code. However, it is unclear to me whether answers must therefore also be runnable code. Specifically, at one point I provided an answer where I used not-quite-syntactically-correct examples for brevity: as one comment pointed out, I neglected to provide correct async return types; additionally I…
I already know that a moderator disagrees with me on this topic, so I expect a dissenting answer but I am posting this for transparency's sake anyway. For questions like Analyze Stock Market Bottom Timing without Looping over Data Frame Rows - it was built specifically around an API (in this case Yahoo Finance) that has been removed from the internet. Never again will this code be able to run. On…
I have a question about usage of libraries, harming performance of other code. I thought the question would fit Code Review being a general point about coding, prepared and put it into CR.SE. I invested some time to strip down to a short and understandable reproducible case, even prepared 'fire and forget' compile scripts, and - tried to - explain my worries in a concise and understandable way.…
Two days ago (or yesterday depending on your timezone) was π-day. So I thought it was a good day to calculate π. I used Machin-like formula to calculate π, in homage of William Shanks , who calculated 527 correct digits of π well before electronic computers. Though I used Newton's Accelerated Arctangent Series and I got my terms from here . I rewrote the arctangent series to make it do everything…
Close to the end of of How do I ask a good question? , we see how a poor question can be transformed into a much better one. It doesn't go quite as far as I would like, however. The sql tag guidance says that presenting the database schema helps users to understand the queries, and may also present opportunities for improvement (e.g. to the indexes). Could somebody more expert than I with SQL…
I have noticed a suspicious pattern of downvotes on questions. Here is a typical sequence of my actions when I post an answer on another user's question: I upvote the question I edit the question I post my answer Within a few minutes of posting my answer, I often notice that the question has a new downvote. In most cases, it is the only downvote on the question. I confirm this by looking at the…
The situation is this: recently, I answered a question here on CodeReview.SE. I was the first to post, and my answer was pretty well-received (5 upvotes and originally accepted). I mainly redesigned the structure of the OP's code, and improved the code in some major aspects of software engineering (readability, reusability, maintainability, clarity, compatibility with potential larger projects,…
I recently posted a question that is meant to have the following block of display-style MathJax at the top. $$ \begin{align} \text{maximize} \quad & f(x) = \sum_{i=1}^n u_i x_i \\ \text{subject to} \quad & \sum_{i=1}^n w_i x_i \leq W \\ & 0 \leq x_i \leq 1, ~~ i = 1 \dots n \end{align} $$ However, attempting to post this gives me the following error: Your post appears to contain code that is not…
In this question Small Bayes Calculator to learn Javascript I ended up adding a maths appendix with a bunch of LaTeX. This LaTeX was detected as "code" and I was supposed to indent it by 4 spaces otherwise it would not let me post it. Indenting it would have prevented it from rendering the equations though, so I worked around this issue by making a picture of the perfectly fine preview and added…
The new feature, GitHub (tilde) code blocks, from Implement ```-style (fenced) Markdown code blocks is a great addition, but there is a small bug which bizarrely only appears on Code Review & Code Review Meta. If a code block contains a blank line anywhere, and the closing ``` isn't followed by a newline, it will be taken as code rather than a closing fence. The bug applies to both the previews of…
As requested by Kaz and approved by the voters here on meta, questions asked on Code Review that do not contain code are now blocked. I've configured this initially as a three-line minimum (or three separate bits of code-formatted text, or any combination of the two). This may be too much; it may more easily be too little. Happy to change it to anything else y'all decide is right. If insufficient…
Your post appears to contain code that is not properly formatted as code. There is no code in my post, only text and links. Here is a link to my question: Limit Drive Starts with Function Block Diagram The following is a copy-paste of the edit I am trying to apply: I have a drive (modulating fan) which needs to be interlocked and prevented from starting. The requirement is that: The drive is…
For a while now we've had "Clippy" , which among other things has support for detecting when there's a lot of code posted but not a lot of description . The feature is nice and comes with good intentions but a lot of users have had problems with this. They've encountered this restriction so they are unable to post, which leads to them either not posting at all, or filling up their post with more…
I posted some code the other week, and got a very good answer. Some of the answer was totally new to me, some of it I found difficult at first sight. So, I went googling to try and understand. In the process, I made a few simple examples to help visualize what was going on. I learned a lot and I don't consider myself a total Python n00b. Is it OK to share what I found, in an answer to my own…
We have a question closure rate of ~30% . That's a significant burden on moderators and users who help triage the questions. While some questions can indeed be very difficult to triage, there are also many many incoming questions that are obviously bad just from a split-second glance. Stack Exchange already has heuristics that can tell whether a question is likely to be low-quality . Wouldn't it…
Currently in The 2nd Monitor , there is a "recent questions" feed that is displayed by our very own Captain Obvious. Would it be a good idea to have a "recent answers" feed, too?
Lints and Hints: What tools are available for checking and correcting the conventions, style and common errors in my language (lint tools), and are there tools that can automatically fix them (hint tools)? This is a follow-up to a comment posted on Is there a place for automated code reviews? Would a list of static analysis tools help jumpstart this? – h.j.k. 34 mins ago Let's list a few tools…
The idea jumped at me after reviewing two close votes in a row (granted, from the same user) that were homework assignments without any code in it. Since a question that has no code in it (or one that is, say, less than 5 lines of code), is 100% garanteed to be off-topic here, can there be a "code-block detection" mechanism that prevents a user from posting a question that wouldn't have a code…
It seems to me that this site should be folded back into Stack Overflow. This site is little known, and because of a lack of reviewers, it does not serve its purpose well. Instead, requests for code review should be marked with, say, a review tag on Stack Overflow. Anybody who does not want to see review requests can filter them out easily.
I have seen several questions containing code that is poorly formatted and totally devoid of comments. One recent example is this C example . For a short code block that might be acceptable, but it is hard to provide meaningful commentary on a long block of code where it may take a lot of effort just to figure out what it is supposed to do. I'm confident that the submitters of those questions…
