I encourage my students to use online resources for programming questions. I think that is part of professional development. I also tell them that they must properly cite their sources. So if @Tamas_Papp helps with sparse matrix data structures, it is not a problem as long as @Tamas_Papp gets credit.
I tell them pretty directly that this does not include getting someone to do your job for you or being a pest. There are also serious plagiarism and academic misconduct issues here, and I remind them that people have lost their jobs and ruined their careers for violating the rules. For example, taking source code from a public repository (like a Julia package) and representing it as one’s own work will get you kicked out of school at my place.
So, I read 'em the rules and tell them to act responsibly. I do not think it is this community’s job to do that. It is mine.
It becomes this community’s problem when hundreds of novices are burying discourse with homework or thesis questions. I think we’ll have to deal with that when and if it happens. I do not see it happening now.
I’ve made your old post a wiki, Tamas, but I agree with @ctkelley — guidance to students is more a question for the course professors/TAs. I don’t know that our guidance to students needs to be any different from Please read: make it easier to help you. The one exception in my mind would be that I’d like to encourage students to be honest up-front that it’s a homework problem.
That said:
The bigger question in my mind is how we suggest (or if we need to have explicit suggestions for) our existing members respond to obvious homework prompts — either explicitly labeled or not. Personally I like SO’s suggestions on this front: How do I ask and answer homework questions? - Meta Stack Overflow.
Curiously I was just about to post something on this, but found other threads in which this was discussed and quit.
I am in the following situation: I am teaching a programming course (in Julia, but not about Julia specifically). I first thought that it would be nice to have a category for home-works here, but even more specifically, it would be nice if we, as users, could create a sub-category with, for instance, the course name, etc. The posts in these sub-categories would not appear for all the users such that one course does not pollute too much the discourse site, but would be available for searches and accessible to students openly.
By being in a home-work category and, even further, associated to a specific course, the demands would be completely transparent in their purpose. The teacher and the students of that course would be able to interact with each other, have their suggestions compared to other questions already done in Discourse, etc, and probably would ending up producing content for newbies (or not, depending on the course) in these threads.
This would require a functionality (the possibility of a user creating a new category, and this category be somewhat hidden from the overall site) which I do not know if exists. But it would turn the Discourse a beautiful platform to support teaching.