How to Spot A Code Vampire

Everyone's familiar with the dreaded Help Vampires that stalk help channels and forums - but recently, a new subspecies of the Help Vampire has been born - the Code Vampires

You've seen them. You've seen the endless tirade of non-formatted code, the refusal to consult the almighty Google, and the painstakingly bad question etiquette. These are the Code Vampires.

What do they do?

They suck the life and good spirit out of a programming community, they take the fun out of helping others, and they disrespect and disregard carefully-written documentation.

More specifically, Code Vampires make it harder for other programmers to help them, often unknowingly, by not engaging in proper question-asking etiquette and disrespecting other peoples' effort and time.

Often, these vampires quickly have wooden stakes drove through their hearts by moderators. But the damage they can do to a community can be irreversible.

What are characteristics of a Code Vampire?

NOTE - Code Vampires can come in any shape or form, but these characteristics usually apply to most of them.

• Never formatting code, i.e. simply copying and pasting, not bothering to use Pastebin or proper syntax highlighting

• Asking vague/broad questions or statements, e.g. "How can I make an app?", "How to build a forum?", "I don't get this."

• Asking a question and going AFK when someone asks for more details.

• Asking commonly-asked (and answered) questions; the type of questions that can be found in FAQs or pinned messages/posts.

• Refusing to consult Google, i.e. asking questions that could be easily answered by a Google search, such as - "What is SSH?", "What is a root user?", "What is a cheap VM provider?"

• Poor question structure (grammatical, overall, etc.) e.g. "How can I do SSH?", "i only want the 1 letter i to get capitalized"

• Spam-posting questions in different channels because they didn't get an answer within 5 minutes.

Code Vampire Examples

These are screenshots of Help Vampires from various programming channels:

• In this example, the user asked for help, but he didn't even tell us the question!

• This question could have easily been answered with a Google search!

• Again, a quick Google search could have given them the answer they needed. Furthermore, they're not very descriptive with their query and should have formatted their question better.

• Their query was not descriptive and specific, they asked a very broad and vague question.

• Their query could have been answered by Google.

I hope you now understand Code Vampires better from these examples!