Policy regarding "flooding" Code Review with questions

Question

There seem to be a few users which "flood" Code Review with questions recently (2 to 4 questions in rapid succession).

They often present relatively small pieces of code, allegedly from homework, coding challenges, and the like. Per se, there is nothing inherently wrong with the questions as such, maybe sometimes a few issues with the tags.

The community seems to deal with these questions in rapid succession by simply stopping to upvote the later questions.

That left me wondering if there is a official policy or community consensus regarding these "question streams".

• rolfl: Loosely related: codereview.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2495/31503
• Peilonrayz: Very very loosely related situation, the person didn't wait between questions and got a net +7/-6.
• AlexV: Maybe also related: Handling Asker not learning from previous reviews

Answer 1

To be completely clear:

• homework^{[1] [2]} and coding challenges are on-topic.
• Issues with tags should be edited, it's rare to get questions with perfect tags - I get them wrong all the time too.

This means the questions are on-topic and so we shouldn't close the questions.

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TL;DR: It's recommended to ignore who the user is, but ultimately it's your choice to vote, comment and answer however and whoever you want.

In general, what does that leave?

• Flagging

  This situation doesn't warrant flags.

• Voting

  You can vote however you want. You can up-vote off-topic questions and down-vote perfect questions. I wouldn't recommend doing either of these, but you have the privilege to do so.

  If you feel this is something that warrants no votes then you're allowed to not up-vote it. Same for down-votes.

  It's normally recommended to vote on the quality of the post, not the user. And so some may disagree with your opinion if you change it because of the user. But these users have their own vote buttons that they can use.

• Commenting

  Some people think down-votes should include a comment. If you decide to alter your vote because of this then you may want to post a comment.

  This can be mutually beneficial. The user stops vexing you, whilst getting more up-votes.

  Some users may ignore your comment, or become argumentative. If they do either I would recommend you leave them be. Nothing good will come from arguing or trying to persuade them to your side.

• Answering

  Answers are entirely optional. Like voting it's recommended to ignore who the user is, as these benefit more than just the poster. But we can't exactly hold a gun to your head, and force you to answer.

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For this specific thing, there shouldn't be a site policy. This is as the act of posting two questions at the same time isn't necessarily bad.

If I had limited internet access then I may download challenges for offline use, and post my solutions when I next get internet access. These challenges may have nothing in common with each other, and so there may be little overlap between answers. Punishing someone in this situation seems overly hostile.

However if someone posts two very similar solutions to two very similar problems, then answers may be very similar. IMO this wastes the time of our answerer's, which I wouldn't encourage (upvote/answer).

And so vote, comment and answer in ways you think will benefit Code Review.

• AlexV: Since these "streams" happen almost daily I dare to doubt that the current situation is an instance of "batch"-solving coding challenges or the like. But of course your reasoning is perfectly valid for the general case.
• Peilonrayz: @AlexV I'm not sure who or what you're talking about. The only thing I can think you're talking about is a "PC-vampires" -- Lin Ma, overexchange, Justin. They vex me as I normally see no improvement after lots of answers, and so I now try to stay far far away from them.
• AlexV: I had the last one of your examples in mind when writing the question. Patterns/anti-patterns are repeated over and over and explanations e.g. on what tags to use don't seem to be taken seriously.
• Mast: @AlexV Feel free to modify the tags if they're wrongly applied. You got over 2k reputation, so changes should be immediate.
• AlexV: @Mast: I do. I also explicitly pointed towards the tag wiki in order to help with future tagging twice. Let's see if it will help in the long run.