## WeBWorK Main Forum

### showHint not behaving as before?

by Alex Jordan -
Number of replies: 2
I have always thought that

$showHint=0; would make hints immediately available. I guess my first question is whether I have been mistaken about that. According to http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/AnswerHints#.V-F_i7VWdoQ the way I read it, this would be the behavior I'd expect. The student should be able to see the hint after 0 attempts, so right away. If this has been the historical behavior, then since my upgrade to 2.12, the behavior has changed. Now I need to set$showHint=-1;

to get hints to appear right away. My guess is that somewhere, a greater-than comparison is being made that should be a greater-than-or-equal-to (assuming things have always worked the way I thought they worked.)

In other words, if attempts=0, then since 0&gt;0 is false, we don't see the hint. But 0&gt;=0 would be fine.

Is there a 2.12 bug here or do I just not remember the behavior right? If it's always been this way, I think we should re-word the wiki that explains how showHint works.