
Launching developer Q&A on Stack Overflow - rnyman
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/11/launching-developer-forums-on-stack-overflow/
======
sentenza
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.

~~~
m_myers
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".

~~~
mapgrep
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.

~~~
to3m
Agree. My (one and only) experience with using Stack Overflow for Facebook
questions was not especially positive, and after having my motives impugned
and my question derided as purposeless I just deleted it. (No point arguing
with the police.) Sadly this was not the first time I'd had this experience on
SO, even if it was my first time using it as any kind of official-looking
support channel, and I would therefore look askance at any organisation using
SO proper for their support.

On the other hand, I've noticed a couple of companies using their own Stack
Overflow install for their support forums, and I'm sure that could work pretty
well. It's not a question of the software, just whether or not the community
is right, really. SO's has ended up with too many volunteer bureaucrats, I
think, and to make things worse there's even a meta site where they can gather
and make up more rules for people to follow. You say organised, I say
ossified... well, let's call the whole thing off. I stopped posting on SO
after my last experience.

I don't expect anybody to care about one person leaving (and nor should they!)
but if enough individual people leave, then I guess eventually nobody will be
left.

~~~
k3n
> after having my motives impugned and my question derided as purposeless I
> just deleted it.

I had the same experience awhile back, it was like a pedantry competition. Ok,
so perhaps I didn't word the question perfectly, but I did provide a lot of
information and examples (spent like 15m just making the post itself). They
need to realize that the people who're going to most frequently ask questions
_are most likely not actually experts in that subject_ , or else they wouldn't
be posting.

> and to make things worse there's even a meta site where they can gather and
> make up more rules for people to follow

If you think that's bad, did you know that they now have chat? When I tried to
delete my aforementioned question, it wouldn't let me, so I went into chat to
see if I could find a mod to ask for help. Well guess what... there I found a
group of mods/powerusers actively deriding me behind my back. Once I let my
presence be known, they quickly shut up, like a bunch of school girls caught
gossiping in class. I must say, that left a horrible taste in my mouth, to
think that they get their kicks making fun of users behind their backs.

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matt_heimer
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!"

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

~~~
rnyman
Yes, I do. :-) That logo is the new logo for MDN, our network for developers
at Mozilla. Since Stack Overflow is a resource for developers we see a direct
connection to that. Also, we have different foxes for different products, so
that would probably be confusing - rather have one consistent look.

~~~
zalew
I could barely recognize what that tag icon means. A small odd white shape on
another odd blue shape. You can spot the Google Chrome and Android icons from
a mile. Come on.

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

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

~~~
DanBC
Reddit is great. People used to say that about Yahoo search, and about Digg.

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babuskov
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).

~~~
Shog9
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.

~~~
rnyman
I second that. Stack Overflow is to discuss problems when developing, whereas
Bugzilla
([https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi](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/](http://support.mozilla.org/)

