Defining scope: this forum vs. StackOverflow

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Now that we have yet another forum, maybe we should delineate what should go here, vs. what should go on StackOverflow (vs. what should go on Quora).

  1. StackOverflow is manic about abiding by their strict rules. We’ve often had perfectly good Meteor questions closed, or even deleted. They also close/delete anything that isn’t strictly “on-topic”, and I’ve had to wage wars to resurrect valuable content. My take:

    If your question could be construed as subjective, or asks for recommendations (“Which package/technique is best for X”), post here in this forum.

  2. StackOverflow is good at getting technical questions looked at by many people who are incentivized by the reputation system.

    I would suggest asking precise technical questions about Meteor on StackOverflow.

    That also increases the visibility of Meteor on SO (right now the [meteor] tag has almost 10,000 questions), and serves as a popularity metric in the inevitable comparison with other frameworks.

Quora: Assuming this forum will work well (to me Discourse looks a bit… alien and cookie-cutter since there aren’t really any good themes, but the functionality is solid), Quora remains relatively left out. I would recommend not asking questions there, but answering them and pointing to SO or here for more information. The types of questions I’ve seen on Quora are most speculative: “How good is Meteor at X”, “What is so cool about Meteor”, “When will Meteor do X”.

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This was already discussed prior to this forum thingy (think it was on the google group).

For me this is quite clear and every of the platform has it’s own place to exist:

  1. Stack Overflow => specific questions with code or aligned to a specific problem
  2. Crater.io => Links to news around Meteor
  3. This forums => everything else and sometimes probably also a bit of the first two (obviously because you cannot force people to ask stuff that is related to meteor anyhwere else. I’d not even try to force this)

Quora: Metor in context to the rest of the world (i don’t see quora to actually be a part of that community toolchain.

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I vote for this as the go to place for everything Meteor. Checking multiple sites is tedious.

StackOverflow: The SO police has ruined the site.
Crater.io: We have announcements here.

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I think Quora is a great place to ask/answer questions about long term strategy or comparisons to other technologies.

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SO has gathered ~10k questions over the past 2.5 years. Do we want that amount of traffic on this forum? Would we want questions as specific as this one (that just happens the most recent question on SO right now)?

In any case, https://www.meteor.com/get-involved implies that questions should be asked on StackOverflow.

They have, the f@$%ers. But specific, non-subjective questions are left alone. IMO, they should keep being asked on SO. Any sort of recommendation questions, or otherwise even a bit shy of the SO guidelines, can go here on the forum.

Agree.

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I agree. I mean is it worth trying to compete with an adequate ubiquitous solution for mindshare anyway? It’s the #1 source for objective technical answers in like…everything.

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Will posts on Meteor Forums be returned in search engine results? If so, I’d rather do a search and pick from the results from all relevant sites. If nothing comes back then I’d head here or to SO. I agree with @manuel that having to check a bunch of sites is tedious. Sometimes necessary though?

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Totally agree with @dandv

The main advantage of keeping programming questions on SO is the increased google juice. (Question and answers on SO rank very highly.)

It’s also gives other developers more exposure to the growing Meteor community and always looks good when developers compare multiple frameworks.

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People will continue to use SO for dev questions including Meteor ones so it doesn’t really matter what we “decide” here. I meant it more like if someone asked me at a Meetup where to go for help, my answer will be “forums.meteor.com”, not SO. I wouldn’t recommend going to SO because I don’t want anyone to waste mental cycles thinking whether the question should be asked in site X or Y.

Just how many times have you had a problem, googled it, the first result is an SO question exactly as you would ask it, you go there and the question has many up votes, the answers help you and they also have many up votes, and yet the question is closed because it doesn’t conform to rule 57, section 3, paragraph 4 of the SO laws…

Again, it’s not like people will stop using SO, so it doesn’t really matter.

My 2cp

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If I would like to contribute with Meteor API design. Will that go on GitHub issues?

These times are so abundant :smiley:. Sites everywhere.

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I agree with @dandv.
SO = Questions with specific problems
Crater = HN-type stuff (i.e. Announcements, Blog Posts, etc.)

I find SO to be very powerful because it allows other programmers from different tech backgrounds to discover Meteor in some way. If they are browsing to see what problems people are having and they see a very interesting Meteor problem, it could peak their curiosity and get them to use the platform :wink:

“For everything else, there are forums.” - Not Mastercard

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It seems that crater.io is coming to an end? The posts on that site are getting older and older in case of frequency is raising on this forum. Wouldn’t it be a good idea, that this forum will post directly on twitter channel as crater did on news tag?

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I am still seeing multiple posts a day, we are just getting more upvotes on articles than others, so new stuff will drop fast without upvotes.

Don’t confuse the Top navigation with the New navigation. I assure you, crater is getting just as much traffic and is doing the same amount of traffic before and after this forum opened :smile:

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As a newbie I must chime in and say the proposal being made here is really discouraging. Will I be chastised in the future for asking a question someone thinks I should have asked on SO? If we have guidelines then it’s likely I will be.

I think it’s an exercise in futility to try to control, or define, what is and is not a worthy Meteor question (what’s going to happen when Meteor officially supports Windows?). This forum is located at forums.meteor.com and, as such, I think the only guideline that’s truly enforceable (and worth enforcing) is that topics be relevant to Meteor.

Perhaps the problem is Discourse? Would this topic be necessary if the frontpage wasn’t a free for all?

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Asking questions here is most welcome.

However, the longer you think about forums vs. Q&A sites, the more you realized what the differences are, and why it’s better to direct different types of questions to each. Here’s a quote on how SO and forums are different:

More:

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