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disclaimer: this is my own personal view on frequent questions about CP. They do not constitute an official statement on behalf of CodeProject, my Employer, or the Kirgisian governmet
Q: How does the voting work? I thought it is the average, but...
A: It is a weighted average. Votes by new members weight less than votes by contributors.
Membership levels range from bronze to platinum. a platinum vote has the same effect as 5 bronze votes.
Q: How about a CD/DVD with CodeProject articles?
A: It would certainly be nice to have an offline collection of articles to browse. However, there are a points against it
(1) Legal: unlike other sites, CodeProject leaves the copyright with the author, and allows code to be published under a wide variety of licences. This is nice, but also means collecting all articles on a CD is a legal mine field. At least each author would have to be contacted for written consent to agree with his articles being included.
(2) Up-to-date articles: "do you want your old, buggy articles floating around on the web?" You can update your articles on CP, but you can't on a CD.
(3) Money. Running a site with even a few full-time employees is expensive, Bandwidth being only a part of it. CP is paid for mostly by advertisement, and maybe you noticed that CP ads are always on topic, and never intrusive. CP needs people visiting the site.
(4) Community. CP would be a cold and barren place without the community. And the community needs people visiting CP.
to be continued...
we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is Vonnegut jr.
Fold With Us! ||
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A:
Don't mention it. it was tried as "Code Project Code Projects" (CP 2) but mostly failed. A few projects that moved away from CP quickly actually took off, though. Reasons are beyond this FAQ.
If you want to start a project, start it. If it's good, people will join. Keep in mind, however, that CPians are a different crowd than your typical OpenSourcers.
we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is Vonnegut jr.
boost your code || Fold With Us! || sighist | doxygen
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The following is as unofficial as the rest of the FAQ, purely my own opinion at the time of posting:
from time to time, complaints or common suggestions regarding the votes pop up.
(1) The "rating" is just a number. Don't get overly excited or depressed about it.
(2) The article voting system works very well long term: good articles rise, bad articles drop
(3) Short term it doesn't work so well: the initial votes (about 5) have a high influence on exposure of your article, and affect if you can attract a "close to final" voting *early*.
(4) You cannot stop "hate votes"
Many ways are suggested to "fix" that, usually to find out where "1" votes come from. None look promising:
e.g. "Require people to leave a comment" : you can't stop people from posting "fhöwfdsnfä"
e.g. "Display who voted what": likely to cause revenge votings, which will distort voting further
(peterchens house rule: don't try to fix social problems with technical measures)
What can you do if you think your article was treated unfairly bad:
First ask yourself: is the article really that good? Compare to other articles with a good rating. From my experience, things that may attract low votes are (in no particular order):
- Non-Standard layout, non-standard font for body, unformatted paragraphs etc.
- Horizontal scolling on 800x600
- Just code, but no article explaining the what, why, how. CP is not a code repository.
- Presenting a solution that shows you don't know enough about the problem
- Pretentious title with simplistic code/implementation
- Broken Download
- Bad english. That is a problem for foreigners, consider asking someone to help you
- Assuming to much knowledge from your readers, not explainig the problem
- Being to popular
- technically inacceptable solution
(Note: I don't claim this is "fair", it's just the way it is. )
Things you can do:
- There are articles about writing good articles. read them.
- Ask kindly if someone would like to help you improve the article (e.g. proof-read, help with english etc.)
- If all this fails, and you still think someone else voted your article down just because he doesn't like you, take a deep breath, and wait for a week.
- If you think you made everything right, and suspect abuse of the voting system, contact a site editor through the suggestions board. Don#t expect miracles, though
What remains is that a '1' vote in the first five or so has much more influence than a later '1' vote. My suggeston: all article start with a vote of 3. It should be implementable eaily, and evens out the playing field a bit. I don't know all implications of this, though.
Some of us walk the memory lane, others plummet into a rabbit hole
Tree in C# || Fold With Us! || sighist
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The licence is chosen by the author of the article.
For authors that means they keep the full right to their work. Yay! They can republish it on another web site, sell it, put it into a book, no problem.
If you want to use code from the article, you(!) must(!) check the licence yourself. There should be one included in the download, or mentioned in the article, or at least in the message board.
If you can't find a licence, you should contact the author. If you post a question in the article's message board, the author gets notified, and can reply.
Sometimes, you can't find the author. With no licence, and no word from the author, you need to assume the worst: the copyright owner does not allow you to use or reproduce the code or other material. I know how bad this can be, but you are taking a definite risk here.
Authors: For bobs sake, add a licence to your article and your code! (and please don't slap a GPL on it because "it makes the code free to use")
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