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Should we have a Code Review Section / category?
As discussed on Meta, should Software.codidact allow reviewing working code as a question?
Traffic is probably not high enough to warrant it's own Codereview community. The existing communities out there for reviewing code are not well known. New users may even view this as a new idea & it differentiates software.codidact from other software communities.
3 answers
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I agree and I think it should be a separate category, with separate posting rules. There are several examples of how the rules for each category would likely be fundamentally different:
Main Q&A category
- Encourages minimal examples to reproduce the problem, particularly when asking for debug help.
- It is fine to post questions seeking help to fix code which isn't working.
- Allows theoretical or big picture questions such as algorithm theory or program design.
- Can ask what code written by others does/works.
Code review category
- Encourages posting the complete code as-is, with no modifications.
- All code must be compiled and tested, with no known bugs.
- Must contain code.
- The poster should be the author of the code and describe what it does as part of the question.
I would definitely allow code review questions (requests) as they are an important part of any professional software developer.
A special category might make sense, although a designated special tag (code-review) might be enough if it also results in a special highlight for at least for the tag.
Proposal, based on the feedback here so far: because code-review questions have special rules, create a category. This allows (and we would need proposed text from the community for):
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Category description: that short text at the top of the posts list; can contain links.
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Posting guidance: you know that text you see about the first textbox when you click on "ask question"? That text can be fully customized. Summarize the rules for code-review posts (like that the code must already work). If it requires more explanation than fits reasonably in that block, summarize there and add a help topic.
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(Optional) help topic, per the previous bullet. Or not.
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(Optional) any changes/additions to close reasons that you need to support this. We can't do per-category close reasons, but we can include the scope in the reasons at least.
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