I think that I generally agree with your thoughts, although I'm not sure that forcing a search before allowing a post would solve the problem.

Implementing something like that would potentially have a knock-on effect into other sections of the site: forcing a search before allowing an SoPW post is fair enough, and probably a good idea, but would this not simply push the "Code this for me" problem into other areas of the site? Having to search before posting to, say, Meditations, or Snippets, would be fairly pointless, in my opinion - even if they cover old ground, it's often a good thing (to a point) to revisit ideas and gain new ideas and suggestions.

Something I would be very interested to see is some sort of "Related Nodes" link that can perform a quick search based on the content of the node being viewed - that could help refine searches immensely (the "That's close, but not exactly what I'm looking for" scenario). I think that something like that may help to cut down the number of duplicate questions that seem to come up time and time again.

I guess the more extreme solution is to point-blank delete nodes that are nothing more than a code request where no attempt has been made to solve the problem. Again, though, I'm not sure that's the best of ideas either.

Something tells me that things like this are something we just have to live with (and ignore?), at least for the time being.

Just some quick thoughts.
-- Foxcub

In reply to Re: Loads of Nodes by Tanalis
in thread Loads of Nodes by AcidHawk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.