You should regularly read the newsgroup duke.cs.cps124 as it may contain announcements, hints, and information relevant to this class. Another important use for the newsgroup is to discuss questions about the assignments and programming problems. In order to make these discussions as useful as possible, it is important that you are as clear as possible when describing your problem. To this end, you should include exact error messages and a minimal number of lines of code so that your classmates or the course staff can help you without having to look at your entire program. Further, you should show evidence of trying to solve the problem yourself before posting. Evidence might consist of a small test program, output from the debugger, extra output from your program, etc.

When posting code, you should be very careful not to post so much as to give away your solution to your classmates. Indeed, such posts may be considered cheating! To avoid this situation, you should post as little code as possible in order to describe your problem. In many cases, you should be able to post only the single line that is causing the problem. In cases where it is necessary to post more, you may want to replace some parts with comments representing pseudocode if possible. In general, try to avoid posting complete functions or classes. If you are in doubt, mail the course staff and we will respond directly or to the newsgroup.

Finally, extra credit may be given for your thoughtful, clear, helpful posts to the newsgroup. The staff for this course is small and may not always be able to respond quickly enough, so it is important that you take some time during the semester to help each other out.