I know and I agree, I guess the question would be whether it was possible just to slice off the straight technical question bit whilst continuing with the rest of the good stuff. Realistically it’s too much of a pain I guess, you kind of need a ‘refactor to SO question and answers’ option in Discourse to allow the takeaways from discussions to be pushed back into the ‘library’ of SO.
I think so - definitely sounds painful. Well, on the bright side I guess it’s a good problem to have - people asking questions here on the forums, in Gitter, Slack, IRC and SO, means people are interested in the platform we all love so much. Definitely a good thing! I guess the more questions we answer no matter where they are, the better as well … unless of course they’re on Experts Exchange … yuck.
You’re seriously quoting Jeff Atwood?
The guy who banned a whole community because a few persons of said community annoyed him (that was the official reason. The inofficial reason: He was annoyed because said community revealed his flagship product to be a bugfest)?
That Jeff?
That guy has zero credibility when it comes to "community building* or similar stuff. He wants an echo chamber, nothing more.
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Yes I know; a lot of people have issues with the guy (I’ve never met him so I have no opinion). I just thought his quotes were interesting, especially with regards to why Discourse was created. Everybody has their ups and downs, but I can really appreciate how he decided to flip a few of the tenants of SO on their head, and come up with a great product like Discourse. His reasons behind its creation are what I think make this forum so much better for community building/helping than SO can/will ever be.
I’m not really seeing where Discourse is such a revolution or better suited to community building than other forums.
You have a list of topics and a number of posts within said topic. That’s bog standard. There may be a number of bells and whistles about it but the underlying mechanisms are nothing special.
I think it’s a great product, but I agree not a revolution. As forum software goes though, I think it was executed on really well. In the context of this thread though, I just brought it up as it’s the forum software that’s being used for this discussion. Relating back to the OP, I’m really just saying I find these forums to be soooo much better at community building (and promotion) than SO.
Just for that, I scrolled up and gave the comment a like. 
Edit: But not really, I can’t find the thread post anymore. Too many replies. 
You’ve read this thread and still can’t figure out why people are displeased with SO?
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@tonyf its free mate !! @sakulstra , @chathuraa who can give @tonyf an invite ? I can’t remember who can do that.
The time is handled via http://doodle.com/poll/8sk6ve5azdtkabbk
Whether or not Flow Router is the correct answer I personally find this sort of blanket signposting really annoying. One is fully aware that one always has the option of giving up completely on what you are trying to do and taking a completely different route (or router in this case). Your option of not answering the questions rather than diverting them is preferable to me.
For some reason this is really common on certain microsoft product forums. They are much the worse for it, next to useless in fact. They are a fake community really and SO has that to a degree too. As a counter example: the gentoo forums were awesome and occasionally quite rough! Lots and lots of diverse (even lunatic, wrong) answers is better than one signpost.
I do find SO helpful although I disliked their appalling attitude from the get go. It is nice to know that it isn’t just me. I wasn’t surprised to find Jeff Atwood was involved. SO seems to feature prominently in search results for some reason.
You can nearly always find and adapt the answer there to fit somehow, even if it is about something else, nodejs or react. So I use it in spite of itself. I have no interest in contributing to SO. It is a resource and that is all. I use serverfault and all the other variants in the same way.
On the name calling and general outrage at not being able to find what you need, I do not know where many people’s sense of entitlement comes from with regard to information posted freely on the internet without guarantee that they see fit to abuse other people giving freely of their time. I wish people were so strident about their rights IRL.
Sorry, but no. Take this sadly very common question for example - “how to pass ID of currently logged user from the client to the server method”. Any answer other than “please don’t do this” is doing more damage than good.
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It’s not really your decision, in my view. Explaining why you think it is currently wrong would be far more constructive or just move on and let somebody else do it. I don’t think your (or my) opinion is more valid than other opinions or should trump or silence other opinions even if it is to some arbitrary standard 100% correct in many other peoples’ opinions. Opinions are like sphincters.
TL DR;
The first question I ever asked on SO was about the structure of credit card CVC numbers. Is it always three digits ? Does it ever contain letters ? etc.
(VISA refers to the code as CVV2, MasterCard calls it CVC2, and American Express calls it CID.) - http://www.cybertec.net/cvv.html
I got downvoted, put on hold, and basically reamed by the community. People said I had no business developing web application forms if I don’t understand the rules of validating credit cards, some pretty nasty stuff. I deleted the question, but now I wish I had saved it. We were simply building a form for Braintree, so I just wanted to alert the user ahead of time for validation errors if I could, rather than wait for the API response. I asked my team and a few other developers, the consensus is that it’s always three or four digits, but I still don’t know for sure, I thought this kind of question was the whole point of SO. It took me a few months to get courage to ask another question.
I’ve heard security questions are the most susceptible to getting bad responses. Outside of that, I think SO is still a great resource for very specific questions which have a reproduction on jsbin or codepen. It’s unfortunate that Meteorpad is not currently available, hopefully MDG will host it as a service. That was a great way to describe specific problems and solutions on SO. The forums here are great to describe concepts and general ways to approach problems. I think both systems have their place. If anyone knows about a specification for those CVC numbers… let me know.
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OFF TOPIC. CLOSING THIS THREAD. 
CVC, always 3 digits for Visa/MC. 4 digits for AMEX.
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Let’s look at some actual data as opposed to gross generalizations:
- There are currently 20,142 Meteor-tagged questions on SO
- Of these only 3,238 have no answers at all, a 16% unanswered rate
- There are 6,795 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers. This includes the 3,238 questions with no answers at all, leaving 3,557 with questions that have answers that have never been accepted or upvoted. It’s quite common for newbies to ask a question and then not accept the answer. It’s also common for people to answer their own questions and for that answer to remain unaccepted and unvoted on since the issue is basically closed.
- So far today (Mar 30th, 2016), 21 questions have been asked of which 5 have been answered. There are several “issues with 1.3 upgrade” questions today which makes today a bit unusual. By comparison there were about 40 questions here (tagged help) in the same time period today but today’s an exceptional day. Monday only shows about 19 questions in this forum all day long.
Let’s compare to a big keyword on SO: Angular:
- 162,291 Questions
- 28,823 questions with no answers 17.7% unanswered rate, just slightly higher than for Meteor
@rahul, @debergalis, @dweldon eldon. Kyll, and Christian Fritz have all answered large numbers of Meteor questions on SO. Personally I’ve learned as much from David Weldon’s fantastic answers on SO as from any other source. His knowledge is encyclopedic and he answers questions in a very accurate, even keeled way. A new expert, Stephen Woods, has emerged as the recent top “answerer.” @rahul’s contributions on SO go way back, I’ve referred to his answers for just basic html/js/css issues several times.
The quality of questions on SO varies quite a bit. There are many newbie questions. Everyone seems to have problems returning data from an async call in a Meteor method. Newbies often try to handle events and async requests in helpers. Detailed questions about packages can be hard to answer if one has never used the package. There are quite a few deployment-specific questions as well (DigitalOcean, EC2, nginx, etc…) that require experience in some other technology to answer. Some questions really are poorly written and almost impossible to answer. A few questions are completely opinion-based (“Should I use Meteor or someOtherPlatformHere”) and these quickly get shut down by moderators (including myself).
The Meteor community is getting to be large and there will naturally be many places for developers to congregate, discuss, and learn from each other about Meteor. SO has great SEO, especially compared to this forum, that it will naturally be the reference source for many answers about Meteor. Personally I hang out on the Meteor Chef slack channel more than here because of the real-time nature of the interactions. I just personally prefer the slack format to the forum one. A general observation is that there are fewer rants there, it feels more productive. This forum has a lot of opinion in my opinion
I agree that some moderators on SO can come across as incredibly insensitive. The first time experience asking a question is probably scarring some people for life. It’s like stopping to ask directions at a gas station and the owner shooing you away with a shotgun while insulting your lineage; you’re unlikely to ask for directions ever again. Fortunately the Meteor community has relatively few of these types of moderators but when people cross-tag their questions with javascript or mongodb they can often show up in “our” community.
The problem isn’t isolated to moderators though - a few weeks ago I had a very unpleasant experience with a new questioner who was very abrasive and arrogant. Two of us tried to help him but he showed up on SO carrying so much anger that we had to close his question as abusive. It’s hard to help someone who’s being a jerk.
As @lassombra points out, it’s also hard to help those who aren’t willing to put in any effort at all into reading the docs or working through the Meteor Guide. Note that “the answer is in the docs” is not an available reason to close a question in SO. There are many valid, accepted answers that repeat the docs. Several times I’ve discovered something in the docs that I didn’t know was there (ex: it was added long after I first read them) from reading an answer that included doc links.
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What’s the link to your ir question? Perhaps I can help?
I get your point, I’m explaining new Meteor developers why I recommend one solution over the other on daily basis, trust me on that. I just don’t do this on Stack Overflow.
But for me, in many cases, it is not a matter of me thinking that something is currently wrong. In many cases it is just plain wrong and leads to serious security issues, like in the mentioned case of passing user ID from client to server method, or doing only client-side validation (another very common thing among new Meteor developers).
Then, there’s second category of things that are not as wrong but are still a risky practice that may be potentially insecure, like depending too much on allow/deny rules or using profile array to keep crucial user data. These are things that should be answered with “stop, use this instead”.
For me it’s a matter of caring about the second person. Of not letting them to experience bad things on their own when they may be easily prevented.
Hi @michelfloyd
As mentioned, I am still new to Meteor and any help would be great.
Direct link to my question here in forums is:
Thanks.
Thanks, Michel! What do you think the forum community can do to assist Q&A here and on SO?