Prevent posts with links to jsfiddle and no code

Question

It's extremely common for people to ask and answer questions with no code other than a link to http://jsfiddle.net or similar service. These of course are not appropriate. I have personally been unable to access jsfiddle for hours due to the site being down while browsing Stack Overflow.

In an effort to help educate people on why this is a bad idea and at the same time improve posts on SO, I suggest some measures be put in place to prevent it from happening.

For example, if the question or answer has:

• A link to http://jsfiddle.net/, http://ideone.com/, or any other site in a specified list
  (but let's be realisitic, the one that really matters the most is jsfiddle)
• No formatted code

...prevent it from being posted, with a message or link explaining why. There may be edge cases where it does make sense, so perhaps we'd need to allow the user to click through the message and post anyways, but at least they will have been warned/educated.

If we need to discuss whether or not "link only, no code" posts are problematic and not appropriate, then so be it - but I think it's obvious and that topic has been well covered. Is there anything we can do to prevent them and encourage people to put their code in their post?

This issue is very specific to jsfiddle, I would like to see something that directly addresses that. If another site becomes the defacto code demo site, then we can cross that bridge when we get to it or look for more general solutions to this ever growing problem. I think that awareness of the issue is key to preventing it, and people don't read the FAQ nearly enough as it is - we need some direct intervention.

According to the owner/creator of jsfiddle, Stack Overflow makes up 30% of all referrals. That's a huge amount. Sure they aren't all "link only" posts, but I want to emphasize how much SO is using jsfiddle in particular to dump their code.

People aren't doing this to harm the site, the usually think they are helping out by making their post easier to read. They need to understand why this is actually a problem, and why relevant code must be posted on the site, not somewhere else. If more people understood, I think the problem would start to go away on it's own - but we'd still need something to deal with newer users who aren't familiar with the rules and goals of SO and Stack Exchange, don't hang out in meta, don't read the FAQ, etc. However, the less examples of jsfiddle-link-only posts there are, the less people will imitate them.

I honestly think that if people understood the problem more, it wouldn't be as much of an issue. This doesn't mean blocking jsfiddle, but preventing posts that rely on links to it. A lot of people are confused about that, and ask me "Since when is jsfiddle not allowed?". It's allowed, but your post should hold up without the link. People need to understand that - a warning message would probably be enough.

I do not feel that this specific issue is "status-completed". I think it's still a major problem that's bound to get worse as the months and years go by.

Here are some examples from the past few hours, as of 2012/10/17 6:45 PM EST:

• D3.js updating spline with new data
• img float:left - margin elements on the right
• Adjust Fontsize depending on div width
• Show/Hide div issue in Jquery
• using .slideDown to toggle a div on or off, also adjusting arrow
• jScrollPane jquery plugin, jspDrag doesn't exceed to end
• yahoo weather change background color by degree
• CSS submenu alignment issue
• Firefox w/ Mouse dragging
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/12943502/398242
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/12943540/398242
• What is the simplest way to turn overflow:visible into a hover-menu?
• Facebook Send button empty flyout
• Multi submenu not working properly in jquery

Here are some more from this morning, 7:30 AM 2012/10/18 (all questions, all within the last couple of hours). I could have easily found a lot more but it was getting boring:

• :after CSS selector position not working
• Like button does not show faces
• jQuery ScrollTo Skips and is Notchy
• Issue in table rows cloned
• duplicate keys on multiple drop down buttons
• Twitter bootstrap 2.1.1 Collapse not animating when Opening a collapsible
• Jquery - floating div
• calculating javascript (simplecart) cart total, adds random decimals to total
• jQuery image fade enlarge top and bottom px
• How to get text-overflow working in tables
• Strip down google map jquery
• Look at this margin bug of First element of Container! And Give proper reason for this
• How to convert jquery code into javascript
• Add jQuery dropdown effect

These were ridiculously easy to find (took me about 3-4 minutes). I don't think the recent change has done very much to help the situatuion. There are literally entire threads on SO that are just passing jsfiddle links back and forth, and it's been like that for a long time - and bound to continue unless something is done to address this specific issue.

Answer 1

The code's been checked in, and will go out in the next build is now active on all (non-meta) sites.

What code you ask? Well, we talked this over and decided the problem isn't really jsfiddle it's just super short posts that contain links as the bulk of their content*. Put another way, there are alternatives to jsfiddle that will come to be used in just the same way; so singling out jsfiddle doesn't buy us much.

Instead, we've changed the minimum body length check to not count anything in the form of a link (doesn't matter to what or whether they're even actually anchors when rendered). We'll be keeping an eye on things to see if the minimum length needs to be raised (it's currently at 30, which I think is a little short personally).

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So, after watching this for a day and looking at what's getting posted... this wasn't enough. While the length limit helps a bit (and closes some other holes in validation around link-only posts), there were still a number of posts that really should have had code (but didn't) getting posted.

Since we couldn't find a reasonable character limit that looked like it would catch most of the offenders (we had a number of examples > 300 characters within 24 hours), we have started special casing jsfiddle and ideone links.

So, from now on, if you try and post to Stack Overflow with a link to either jsfiddle.net or ideone.com you'll be required to include some properly formatted code as well. We do special case direct links to their home pages, so you can still mention http://jsfiddle.net/.

To be clear, links to jsfiddle and similar services are OK but a question or answer should stand on its own. Enough information should be included in any post to still make it useful for future visitors even if all the links were to break, in other words.

_{*We've always felt that answers should be able to stand alone, without any external links.}

Answer 2

Absolutely a good idea, if somewhat tricky to implement.

It is the current policy of Stack Overflow that questions cannot depend on external links to be meaningful or answerable, and we are doing nothing to enforce this.

People are constantly posting questions which contain a description of the problem and a link to a jsfiddle. What's worse, people provide them with answers that contain nothing but a jsfiddle and entire question becomes a series of revisions to a jsfiddle. Utterly useless, and not at all how Stack Overflow is supposed to work. I would love to see some strong deterrent to this flow.

I think that stopping posts which contain a jsfiddle link but no code blocks is a great idea, and has a pleasant side-effect of forcing people to format their code with indents inorder to make the site recognize it.

Answer 3

It's fairly easy to get the code from jsFiddle. If someone would enter a jsfiddle link system could pull css, html and js code (show_css/ show_html/ and show_js/, in ex. http://jsfiddle.net/zalun/8nC4x/show_js/)

Instead of making life more complicated SO would simplify entering code.

Answer 4

Instead of preventing posts with links to JSFiddle and no code, I believe a better approach should be encouraged.

For example, question with the following format can be considered very good.

I can't get the ready on this function execute

$(document).ready(function() {
   console.log('I am ready');
});

Fiddle showing the Issue

But to enforce such pattern would worsen many other good patterns too. But instead we could eliminate the need of systems like JSFiddle at all.

As for suggestions:

Some of us, use some patterns to annotate the type of coding in the answer like <!-- language: lang-js -->, so may be we can use these and create an Sandbox to show the issue ourselves and not rely on jsfiddle or similar. Let me try to explain this in reference to above example

To take inputs like this:

<!-- language: lang-js -->

$(document).ready(function() {
    console.log('I am ready');
});

And give a option to run it

$(document).ready(function() {
   console.log('I am ready');
});

run-this-in-new-window

Such button can then trigger a popup or iframe running the code.

Answer 5

Would it not be better to incorporate the feature set of what jsFiddle has to offer, after all, there is a reason why people are using it.

I personally can't stand the limited text view of posting code into a forum, particularly if im trying to describe a visual problem, I need people to see the problem for them to be able to help, now they have to copy and paste all my code into an editor just for them to see it, instead of clicking a link.

Answer 6

The minimum-text body length does not even come close to fixing the issue. Here are some recent examples:

• https://stackoverflow.com/q/12939089/497356
• SlideToggle and Callback, am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?
• jQuery toggleClass on specific class
• Make sure a float:right element is vertically aligned to the top, even if next to a float:left element
• css3 rotating words align center
• Zoom an image every one second jQuery
• https://stackoverflow.com/q/12937252/497356
• vertically align multi-row text within li tag in IE quirks mode
• Highstock add points to dynamically added series
• How to resize web content based on window size
• How do I fade in vertical menu child items using Jquery
• "real" baseline for typography (Bonus, two fiddles and no code)
• multilayer canvas issue in attached example
• Method call function in a table row clone editable
• Slide Toggle issue
• Footer won't go to the bottom
• https://stackoverflow.com/q/12933274/497356
• Layout with continuous background images, but centred content?
• jQuery drop down menu position while scrolling
• Background text in a Bootstrap WELL

(PS: This is an editing field day, please help out by adding the code to the questions themselves if you have a moment)

These 20 examples took me a matter of minutes to find, and they've all been asked after 10-17-2012, when the "fix" should have been in place.

Keep an eye on these search results. The majority of them exhibit the link-to-code-only problem.

The accepted answer is not an acceptable solution. This needs to be addressed more aggresively.

---

Proposed solution:

Okay I know this isn't perfect but maybe it'll give someone else an idea.

How about simply not allowing users to post questions that include a link to a specified set of code-hosting sites (JSFiddle, IDEOne, etc.) and do not include any code? Is there ever a chance that a link to one of those sites and no code is actually a valid question? I don't think so. Wouldn't this be relatively easy to implement?

Updated per comments below:

In addition, we should tell users why they can't ask a question that isn't meeting our quality standards. We could display a message and link to a useful meta Q&A or an item in the FAQ.

Answer 7

Here's a query to help find those kinds of posts:

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/374895/find-question-in-the-past-month-that-have-links-to-jsfiddle-or-codepen-but-no-cod

select concat('http://stackoverflow.com/questions/',Id) as 'Link', Score
from Posts where CreationDate > DATEADD(MONTH, -1, GETDATE()) and PostTypeId = 1
and (Body like '%jsfiddle.net%' or Body like '%codepen.io%')
and not (Body like '%    %' or Body like '%<pre>%' or Body like '%<code>%')

It finds all posts in the last month that contain "jsfiddle.net" or "codepen.io" in the body, but don't have one of these three code markers: `, <code>, or four spaces

It won't catch all of them, but it's mostly free of false positives.

Answer 8

I think there's a better method to address the perceived concerns of this page.

The concerns appear to be that when people use links to JSFiddle it's bad because:

• Sometimes JSFiddle is down.
• Stack Overflow gets too many outbound links. I'm not sure what the negative part of this is, but I will assume it's that SO loses search rankings and "link juice". Quoting from above, "According to the owner/creator of jsfiddle, Stack Overflow makes up 30% of all referrals. That's a huge amount."

I don't think the answer to either of these two concerns is to clone JSFiddle's content.

In terms of the first concern, I will present a better solution below. But I'd like to preface this by saying that links which change are just the nature of the web. This is no different than if a Stack Overflow page linked to the right documentation page to address a question. If the documentation goes away, the link of course dies. Nobody would expect anything else. It does not change the fact that posting the link was the correct answer to the question, and that it was a better answer than copy-and-pasting the whole documentation into SO.

The same is true for sites linking to Stack Overflow. You wouldn't expect everyone who linked to Stack Overflow to first copy and paste the whole site into their own blog, just in case Stack Overflow goes down, would you?

In terms of the latter concern, that too many outgoing referrals is bad for Stack Overflow's search rankings, copy and pasting isn't good either. Search engines consider cloning the contents of other sites to be "black hat SEO" and might in fact penalise sites which conduct themselves in this manner. More importantly, it just doesn't feel right for a site which is known for its openness.

In addition to not addressing the concerns voiced, cloning content from JSFiddle should be considered bad because:

• Someone took the time to present their answer in a better, more useful format. Removing that formatting (or hiding it under a wall of copy and pasted unformatted code) lowers the quality of Stack Overflow answers.
• It's against the DRY principle of coding. There's a proper page with the correct answer. Repeating it introduces inefficiency.
• The code on JSFiddle is fully tested. You cannot "test" code quoted in a SO answer. The JSFiddle code is likely to be of a higher standard.

An Alternative Proposal

I propose that any concerns about "link juice" and page rankings are simply forgotten. The web is open, Stack Overflow benefits from it, and the web should benefit from Stack Overflow. This is the meaning of "web" - things are connected. SO is doing great in page rankings already.

On the second concern, the matter of dead links, I propose a non-intrusive technical solution instead: if a link appears to be dead, display a popover to the reader of the answer. "This JSFiddle link seems broken. Would you like to view our cached copy of the code instead?"

The code would be cached automatically at the time of posting.

If there is concern that the code cannot be cached because of licensing issues, then the author of the answer including the link could be asked to confirm they authorise SO to save a cached copy (of only the code itself, not the JSFiddle site itself as the author is unlikely to be able to authorise that).

Note that the cached copy is never even mentioned if the link is not actually bad. This is in consideration of the open spirit of the web and the fact that, again, it improves the quality of the SO answer when JavaScript code is presented in a tested, DRY and ready-to-use manner.

Answer 9

I don't like this feature. I absolutely shamelessly hacked around it by adding an empty "block of code"

-

And then linking to jsFiddle.

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The right answer to this question is either implement jsFiddle on SO or don't do lame hacks like this at all.