I agree, but then I almost always think the community should be the arbiter of thread content, not the mods.
I agree completely, which is what I meant by “a thread lives or dies on its merits”. But if the mods aren’t on board with that, they have to clarify the rules.
This is uncalled for, dude. I imagine his English is a lot better than your grasp of whatever language it is he mainly speaks.
Agreeing with all of this. “Please tell me the solutions to these 10 quadratic equations” would be bad, but who would go to the trouble of actually answering that? If a thread spawns an interesting discussion who cares what the motive is? I’ve asked a few questions that could have been homework, but were spawned by my own self study.
How is babby formed. The method by which girl get pragnent. Which I’ve never seen answered on *this *board, by the way.
Would you mind posting links?
With trepidation as I don’t want to get a poster warned, especially since I don’t think they did anything wrong- promise amnesty? 
The first one was discussed in the other thread on this topic.
So, you admit the policy works? :rolleyes:
The worst they’d get is a mod note, which is what Reza got even though this is the second time he’s been told to stop doing this. Anyway this thread is from January, so it’s kind of late to do anything about it. My guess is that nobody reported it at the time.
That’s not the one. It was recent, after the first Reza discussion thread. I sent them in a PM.
The mods discussed your first example and felt that the OP was asking for help in figuring out how to get the right answer. Our policy has been that that’s OK, but asking ‘what’s the answer to this homework problem?’ is not OK. I’m not sure if the mods were aware of your second example.
I know and I disagree with rationale, but that’s a matter of opinion. And my point is then that the rules should be clarified to illuminate that fine line. Reza’s original thread, that was closed, was also asking for clarification after he did his own research, but that was not ok. The current rule is too vague to know what’s ok and what’s not.
This. Who are you, the school police?
Right, but doesn’t all of that suggest that the rule itself is pointless? If some brand new member has clearly joined just to ask us to do his homework for him, no-one here is likely to offer much help anyway. Here’s an example from the early years of the board, showing that a lazy person who just wants homework answers, without making any effort, is likely to receive little satisfaction around here.
Exactly. It’s an incredibly artificial distinction, and one that makes basically no sense.
Exactly.
None of this board’s contributing members wants the Dope to become another Yahoo Answers, and so the membership will police this issue itself, without any silly rule.
Also, as i suggested previously, the rule only really works when the person seeking help is honest enough to admit the reason. If you’re a tiny bit canny, it’s very easy to get aorund. In the case under discussion, if Reza had said something like, “I’m trying to teach myself better English, and i’m studying all the books that i have, but i just need help on some things that i don’t understand,” there would have been absolutely no problem with the threads in question. Why those same threads are suddenly verboten just because he’s using the information in connection with his work is completely beyond me. If he had been making no effort on his own, and was just asking the board for answers without wanting to learn, that might be different, but it clearly isn’t the case. He’s interested in learning this stuff, and is clearly making his own efforts to do so.
I’m currently putting together some content for a small website i want to build, related to my work as a college instructor. I’m going to use Wordpress for my website, and i’ll probably come here (and maybe go to other, more specialized boards) asking for help with Wordpress, and with tweaking things like PHP, CSS, and jQuery.
I even thought about taking a Javascript/jQuery course at my local community college over the summer to help me out, but couldn’t because the dates don’t fit with my other obligations.
Under the rules of this board, i can come here asking for help with my ongoing efforts to understand jQuery, but if i stated upfront that it was to help me complete a college course assignment, i would be violating the “no homework” rule, even if the questions were essentially identical. This makes no sense, especially as all you have is my word that any particular question, or thread, is or is not a homework question.
No, it punishes stupidity. I think you underestimate how much of it there is out there, especially when compared to honesty.
ETA: If a person is clever enough to actually read the rules and then figure a way around them, they are perfectly suited for this MB.
Actually Dopers have been great over the years at helping people work out stuff that they need to learn – not by giving people the answers but by advising them in such a way that they figured it out on their own, which is what this kind of thing is all about.
Reza makes his living doing other people’s homework for them – providing them with the answers. This defeats the entire purpose of homework, which is to teach people about how to derive answers for themselves, how to acquire knowledge. It’s learning how to learn. Simply purchasing the knowledge for a price makes them no smarter, that’s not fighting ignorance at all but actually enabling it.
You’ve been here for ages, yet you made that nonsensical statement. Don’t spend much time in GD or GQ, do ya? Some people here can’t write an abstract in under 1000 words! Especially about 1930s Germany. 
No, i really don’t. I’m well aware of how much stupidity there is on the internet. But the rule doesn’t punish stupidity at all because, as has been made abundantly clear in the past when stupid people post stupid, obvious homework questions, no-one answers them anyway.
This is a complete copout, and at the same time actually supports my argument against the rule. We don’t need to the rule, not because we want to do everyone’s homework, but because the majority of members here will police the issue just fine without the rule, and because, when the rule is actually invoked, as in Reza’s case, it’s often handled badly by the very people who are charged with enforcement.
The homework question is - at this point - a secondary issue. The simple fact is that Reza directly disobeyed the instructions of a moderator.
If he disagrees with a ruling the proper thing to do is to appeal it, either through PM or through ATMB. Near as I can tell Reza did neither in such a way as to cause a change in the ruling. At this point he should expect any thread he starts to receive increased scrutiny to see if he’s still doing similar tricks.
Cite?
Do you know that the question he asked involved homework? I don’t know that it doesn’t, nor that it does. Did he say something that I missed or are you assuming?