Earlier today I submitted an insufficient article to CodeProject site (guilty as charged) that was deleted. To post the article I had to spend time to register first and then go through the article wizard to submit it.

I was then promptly emailed by the web master notifying me about my article removal. I accepted their decisions gracefully and replied back thanking them for notifying me.

Since I didn’t want to duplicate the article else where (my article, my call) I just left a brief summary (Introduction) and the link to my blog. I also apologized for redirecting the users to my blog instead. Submitting the hard drive serial number post to my blog was hard enough let alone I wanted to go through the whole process of reformatting everything again.

Seconds before my article was removed I visited my article’s page to see if there were any comments that I needed to reply. I was shocked by what I have discovered. I couldn’t believe I became a victim of CodeProject users myself.

None of the comments apart from one that I’ll explain were directly related to the subject of my article. Virtually every single user tried to hammer me for being lazy with my article and talking about ‘votes’ and what I should have done to increase my chances for collecting their votes, huh? I didn’t know CodeProject had gathered the best brains in I.T. community.

They don’t know it yet but they all have actually voted for me but for being lazy. I must have been on a bottle of JD or two while I was looking for a solution on google. This is totally out of character for a lazy person, don’t you say?

I have to admit I’m really confused right now because either me is trapped in another world or they are and if they are I know what world that is, virtual. Incidentally one of the users were MVP (allegedly) that replied in a fashion that only himself could read it, or was he on JD too? I’m sure he was rich and loaded with virtual points.

The other user commented something along “nothing new anyway”. His reply was almost at the bottom of someone else’s reply thread. Sorry mate! I must have missed your article on the same subject among the 55,000,000 hits I got when I searched for “hard drive serial number” on google the other day.

To train a new gang member (normally a kid who is hanging around more senior gang members) they would pick a victim and bash him until he is defenceless then ask the kid to have a go at the victim. Some how when I read his reply it reminded me of the gang movies I watched on the telly.

I’m sure I’ve been a visitor of the CodeProject site longer than the registered users who replied to my article so rudely. I’ve seen the same thing many times on CodeProject site where a developer’s article was picked on by the same type of users. In some cases they were really rude to the author that I felt so sorry for the chap. I hold CodeProject responsible for not kicking out such users.

Obviously I would never try to contribute to a community that encourages its users to collect virtual points and doesn’t screen its site properly again. I’ve been around long enough to know this kind of system is open to abuse.

The true lazy developers just submit questions to such community sites so that others rush to answer them first to pick up the points, then what?

I’ll blog about the side effect of the Developer Communities in the near future.

I’d like personally to thank the bad wolves because you would make the good guys look apart.