I’m on the cobol track and I’m having difficulties with binary-search and I need help but the system says I don’t have any mentoring slots left. Should I be checking my other tracks to see if I have any outstanding there? I’d mentor myself if I could but in this case that wouldn’t help.
Thanks. I closed off the two outstanding discussions in Scala and Delphi. No outstandings left. But I still can’t request a mentor for a cobol exercise. O @iHiD and @ErikSchierboom , canst thou aid my overuse of the vocative?
I’m fairly sure I’ve told the system that I’ve finished with mentoring (no one ever came to my aid) and that I’ve marked each as finished. Then again, my almost 64 year old brain has been known to malfunction
I would have thought that marking the exercise complete and publishing would automagically end the request for mentoring but obviously not. Okay, now I know.
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Ah. Most mentoring happens after an exercise is marked complete.
Not in my experience
Nor mine, as well, but then I do not have visibility as @iHiD would have to know exactly when things happen.
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How do either of you know whether the exercises you’re mentoring are completed or not?
I think there’s confusion over completing an exercise (i.e. a passing solution) and marking an exercise as complete.
When you start an exercise, it’s marked as “In-progress”. However, you can’t request mentoring until an iteration is submitted through the editor or CLI. The exercise remains “in-progress” until you click the Mark as Complete button on the exercise page which updates the exercise to “Completed”. At that point, you can optionally publish one or more of your iterations, changing the exercise to “Published”.
Mentoring can occur at any point after the exercise is started once there’s at least one iteration available. There’s no connection between a mentoring request and whether an exercise is in-progress or not. In the past, I’ve marked exercises as complete to unlock additional exercises while still being mentored. I’ve also requested mentoring for exercises I completed a while back as well.
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A hint (to me) is if the solution shows up in the community solutions, that is an indication to me that it has been marked as completed, in addition to mentoring being requested (as I see it in the mentoring queue or it says “mentored by”.
Also, when I ask for mentoring, I very seldom do so after I mark it as complete, unless it is quite a while after I have “completed it” and realize that I want mentoring on something new that I likely had not considered while solving it earlier. So part of it is also biased by my own practice of “when do I ask for mentoring and when do I mark it as complete”.
Honestly, I do not really care if it is complete or not, though express concerns when I feel like “end discussion” is hit earlier than is probably “good”, especially as it changes my notifications.
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