Launching developer Q&A on Stack Overflow

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/11/launching-developer-forums-on-stack-overflow/

by rnyman • 13 years ago

99 53 13 years ago

hacks.mozilla.org

sentenza• 13 years ago

In principle, it is good to go where the community is. Let's just hope they don't get slowed down too much by the questions police.

GeneralMayhem• 13 years ago

Or maybe they'll have the heft to get the questions police to lighten up once in a while?

m_myers2• 13 years ago

Or maybe the "questions police" is the reason the community is there and not in yet another weed-infested forum.

Disclosure: Card-carrying member of the "questions police".

DanBC5• 13 years ago

The SO network is wide. Some of the questions police are reasonable. Some of them are wingnuts.

It's kind of off putting - I don't want to ask questions in some of the other communities because I just can't be arsed to deal with moderator roulette.

I'm not sure that's the effect that SO wants to be having.

lambda4• 13 years ago

I appreciate that SO has a focus specifically on answerable programming questions, and that people are willing to protect it.

On the other hand, I find the the "questions police" are sometimes a little too hasty to shut down actually useful questions, that may stray a bit into the grey zone or may not be phrased as well as possible. I see a lot of new users posting questions that aren't quite clear enough, and then rather than commenting in a way that will help them clarify the question, people just downvote, vote to close, and move on.

There are some people who are just hopeless; no matter how much guidance on asking good questions you provide, they won't get it. But you shouldn't assume that when someone asks a question, and just vote to close. It can really hurt to have a question downvoted or closed, and put someone off the site. I think those tools should be used only for blatantly abusive or off topic questions, or users who really don't get it and keep asking the same things over and over again.

mapgrep• 13 years ago

That's very close to a tautology. People who are on S.O. ("the community") are there because they like how it is run, overall, and the questions rules and police are a big part of the experience. People who are disgruntled tend to leave.

Personally, I tend not to post because of the stress of having a question policed. You guys should have a full fledged StackExchange site (not Meta) where people can ask which other SE site to post their question on. I'm not kidding. Because of the complexity/sophistication of the software, the rules on SE/SO are far more baroque than the rules on Usenet ever could have been.

pnathan4• 13 years ago

I've essentially left off contributing to SO because of the moderators/questions police.

I vastly prefer basically any other format (yes, even phpBB) to SO because of the mod squads.

archangel_one• 13 years ago

FWIW, no, I think the reason "the community" is there was mostly because the founders provided enough star power to get the thing started. I'm not sure it's as far as in spite of the "questions police", but I've seen too many arbitrary question closings to believe it's because of them.

oftenwrong• 13 years ago

As it currently stands, this comment is not a good fit for our discussion format...

matt_heimer• 13 years ago

Besides the dino head on the tag buttons what exactly does this mean? All the article says is "We are now happy to announce our presence on Stack Overflow!"

tikhonj• 13 years ago

My understanding is that it means Mozilla employees are actively monitoring those tags as part of their job.

rnyman4• 13 years ago

It means that we are sponsoring those tags on Stack Overflow, have a landing page there and that people at Mozilla actively monitor and take part in discussions marked with that tag.

cpeterso• 13 years ago

Do you know why Mozilla's Stack Overflow tags are using the dino head logo instead of the fox?

diggan• 13 years ago

It's a funny thing that I yesterday read in the Mozilla branding guidelines[1] that they are retiring the dino head and now announces that he's back.

Different shape and color guess I makes it, but they should mention it in the guidelines.

It's a good thing I think that they are spending time helping people. It is developers within Mozilla who are answering the questions so hopefully they will take notice of what is confusing and troublesome for people and use it to fix the concentrated areas.

[1]

"A note on the dino"

"The classic Mozilla dino head logo served as a symbol of the organization since our earliest days, but has now been retired from active duty. While the brand has evolved, the dino had not been updated in quite some time and is no longer the best representation of who we are today. He spends his days traveling, reading and still looking out for the interests of users everywhere (some habits die hard). We wish him well in his future endeavors. Please use the Mozilla wordmark on all properties and materials instead." - https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/styleguide/identity/mozilla/br...

rnyman4• 13 years ago

That logo is part of the new MDN redesign. In general, the dino is very popular among developers so I believe we will most likely continue to use it in developer circles, whereas it might go away in others.

And exactly, we both want to help out and also identify what developers have issues with.

elchief• 13 years ago

I'm not sure why other companies even use forums instead of StackExchange.

DanBC5• 13 years ago

It's vaguely scary to think people will be putting all their traditional forum stuff in SE or Reddit.

Yahoo, Myspace, and Digg all used to be pretty big.

Already__Taken• 13 years ago

why not reddit? Topical threaded conversation like miles better then the classic forums, they can't die fast enough.

MichaelGG• 13 years ago

SE is poorly suited to actual discussions and any back-and-forth sort of troubleshooting.

flipchart3• 13 years ago

SO also doesn't fully endorse[1] using it as a support forum per se.

  [1] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/3966/is-it-okay-to-use-stack-overflow-as-the-support-forum-for-a-product-or-project

nknighthb2• 13 years ago

I would not do business with any company that puts their customers at the mercy of SE's toxic culture.

babuskov• 13 years ago

From what I can tell, this means they will be monitoring the tags to spot potential bugs and strange behavior.

Well done! I rarely have to report some problems with Firefox and trying to remember my bugzilla password is a major PITA. Most of the time I had to reset it. OTOH, I'm using SO almost daily. I just hope they will be able to really monitor it and not get overwhelmed (I have no idea how many questions are opened for those tags daily, hopefully not too many).

McGlockenshire• 13 years ago

From what I can tell, this means they will be monitoring the tags to spot potential bugs and strange behavior.

They'd better damn well! [html5-apps] is a horrible, horrible thing that meets many of the definitions of a "meta" tag.

Shog94• 13 years ago

Bug reports should still end up in Bugzilla. Sorry; that's what it was built for.

The goal here is to encourage development questions - folks writing code targeted at HTML5 or Firefox OS.

Not that bug reports never draw on problems identified in development questions of course... But don't throw away your Bugzilla account just yet.

rnyman4• 13 years ago

I second that. Stack Overflow is to discuss problems when developing, whereas Bugzilla (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi) is for reporting actual bugs and the support site is more about product support: http://support.mozilla.org/

Launching developer Q&A on Stack Overflow

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