Things that annoy me in SoloLearn

Hi viewer!

Just letting you know, the title might be a bit misleading, I am not trying to say that SoloLearn is a terrible platform, on the contrary, I love it; I have interacted with some wonderful people on here and have experienced very little drama, which is a good thing! The codes are all good too, beginners and experts alike!

However, there have been some crazy things that I have seen on here (but still, the good outweighs the bad), and I just thought that maybe I could talk, in general about the negative things I have experienced on here! (this is a sort of satire and I am not calling out anyone in particular). If you have any safe for work stories regarding SoloLearn feel free to put them in the comments below :). I will do a positive code about SoloLearn in the future! Press the numbers to continue

People copying codes!

You'd think that people would have the decency to not copy codes on this platform, but you'd be wrong.

I have seen people copy codes on here, without asking permission, and to be honest, I have seen this happen to people and it has happened to me once. Usually this gets sorted very quickly by contacting an admin on the forums, in a thread titled: "Let's stay together people".

Why these people copy are a mystery to me! Like what are they gaining from doing this? 15 minutes of fame?! A job as a programmer who can't code? And just to be clear, if you copy from somewhere and you cite their original work, then it is not copying (as long as you have the author's permission). Some people get inspiration from a code to make a better / more efficient version of that code, that is okay too :) as long as you cite / ask permission.

But on a positive note, when your codes are getting copied by people, you know that you're getting good at programming :D.

Those pesky group chats!

Around 9 months ago, SoloLearn brought out a new function (sorry IOS users - not for you yet) called Messages. These included the ability to make group chats and these group chats enabled the user to message multiple people at once... annnnnnndddd well, you can only guess what happened! I started getting invited to many different chats all at once, and my phone could not stop buzzing all day, every day! It got so bad that I had to turn off message notification in the settings section!

The weirdest group chat that I got invited to was a group chat involving a person who kept asking me and other people to help him out with his programming. I left, then i got reinvited, and I left again, then I got reinvited again. Eventually I told that person that he can't just get us to help him out with his codes if we don't want to, as most of us are busy doing other things. He understood, he the created better codes himself and is doing well to this day :).

As for the rest of the group chats, after the huge hype, they seemed to get very silent apart from the odd person advertising their codes, this may have led more people to leave those chats. SoloLearn messages were a good idea, and i'm sure there are still functional groups out there! I am in a few good groups :).

People making malicious codes!

So... in the early days of the SoloLearn "social media" system where people can share codes to each other and can see each others codes, there were a quite a few malicious codes floating about, now I can't really get into the really nasty ones, but there was one experience that I had which is safe for work (yay!).

I was just strolling around on SoloLearn, looking at codes and posts, upvoting anything in sight, until I saw this code with a low amount of upvotes, so I thought "well it's up to me to upvote, but i'll check it out first". And well, the code had a button with the text "dont press this", to which I the pressed the button, and then I received a flurry of messages via the alert command stating "ur dumb" over and over again, to which I tried to leave, but I couldnt, so I had to force shut down the app to get out of this infinite loop!

So please, when you're coding, try not be malicious, rude, racist, etc. we're all on here to make codes and maybe even make new careers! Make variables, not war! AND PLEASE TEST YOUR CODE BEFORE POSTING IT JUST INCASE IT HAS AN INFINITE LOOP!

Advertising Unnecessarily

Did you ever get so desperate that you had the urge to just... advertise that code EVERYWHERE???

Well... if you make good programs or are just popular on here, you may have noticed it!

Now, just to make things clear, I am not talking about the people who advertise in specific threads (the ones that say "post your codes here") or some groups. Now with that out of the way. In programs I have posted recently, if they do really well, there is at least one person who posts their code, which is completely unrelated to my code and it just feels like if they post it on my thread some people will look at it and they'll upvote their codes. My code isnt an advertising space for your codes, okay?:)

Don't be a piggybacker, just upvote peoples codes and post in the specific threads dedicated to advertising, as well as sharing your codes in the social media section, it will help so much more than just going overboard!

Help me do my homework??? / Creepy Messages

No I £$%&£$ won't do your homework. Don't ask me.

Yes I have got messages like that, it's a bit weird, but I guess not too creepy, I can just ignore them and I won't be affected by it.

However, I have seen an instance of a person sending creepy messages to another person consistently, in posts on SL (and probably messages) and elsewhere on the targetted person's social media. If I remember correctly, it was a marriage proposal, and of course, once everyone saw this happening, they jumped on the person. (so I guess that's justice :) ).

Moral of the story... don't be creepy! And don't ask people to do your homework / coursework. If you want to message someone to check if they are okay, then sure, go on ahead, but when asking if they are okay becomes "hey bb havent seen you in a while miss u so much xx, wen we guna be 2ether? answer me nao!" and that person is just a friend on SL, then yeah, that's just creepy.

"OMG LIKE MY CODE PLZ!"

So this is probably going to be the most controversial point out of them all, because i've seen many people asking for upvotes on their codes.

Why do people do it? Because more upvotes equals a boost to get their code into the trending / hot today section, a bit like the Facebook and YouTube algorithms - they get seen more, and then they get more of a chance to get upvoted more etc.

But from what I've seen and what I do, if people like the code, even if it has mistakes / errors, they may like it anyway! Having a big "please like my code" message discourages people like me from upvoting your code!

Is advertising your codes on advertising threads asking for upvotes? I guess so (I do this), but not in a desperate enough way, as one could just opt out of the notifications of that thread.

Angry Downvoters

Some people get angry at others on here, like super angry, for very little to no reason, luckily this one is rare.

Let's say you've just made your 10th code and you go look at what others are doing, and you see a discussion in the forums (q&a) where there is a discussion going on about the new JavaScript feature, you then disagree with someone with a well thought out rebuttal to his point about how variable hoisting is bad, then you go to sleep, wake up and realise that all your codes have lost upvotes, why? Could it have been that guy who you disagreed with? You can't prove it, and even if he did, it doesn't matter!

Now, a while back, I have seen / heard of people downvoting other people's codes, just because they don't like the person, even if they liked the code, they just spam downvote them, even with alt accounts too in some cases. I have also seen people complaining about this. And I have experienced it too a few times.

Are you really that angry that you feel the need to continuously mass downvote codes??? Like seriously??? You're not gaining anything from it, you could be using that anger to produce codes! :)

Embedding a Youtube Video (that isn't yours) in your code

Yes, I have seen people doing this... WHY DO IT?

Having a code and titling it to the video title of the YouTube video you've snagged and then importing it into your blank code does not mean that your code is good, it's rather non existant. And let me clarify, I am talking about people who ONLY have the imported video as their content in the code and nothing else. If you had some text below the video, then at least that'll be something! And if you made your own video player from scratch, or messed around with HTML5, or even with the YouTube API then okay sure its a code.

Yes the video you embedded might be funny, but if the content of your code is JUST THAT, then you could of just linked me the video instead?

CODE OF THE DAY!!!

Ahhhhhhh... Code of the Day! The weirdest algorithm i've ever come across in my 27 year history of living...

So if you know what i'm like on here you may already know that I made an angry post about Code of the Day months ago and that got some attention from the Mods, and some agreed with me and understood what I was saying, where as the majority did not agree with me.

But what was I saying? Well that day, I saw a guy who had less than 50 upvotes on his code being given Code of the Day, and I checked out the code, and I was not impressed, take nothing away from the person, he/she didnt do anything wrong, it was just the algorithm itself having a low threshold for picking COTDs. So I decided to make a thread about it, because I had seen MUCH BETTER codes with less than 10 upvotes.

The Famous Andrew G, has had 6 COTDs and there is a good reason for that,unfortunately his profile has been removed but he is mentioned here. Very good coders will inspire the smaller less experienced coders, thats how COTD can help the less experienced coders, if they see the standard at which they need to be at then they will work towards that.