Re: ask.gnome.org for developers

[Jim Nelson <jim yorba org>]

I'd like to toss in my two cents in support of a Stack Exchange-style GNOME developer site.  I think Stack Exchange is a proven winner for developers helping each other with technical problems.  Ask Ubuntu has gone over very well, and it strikes me that an Ask GNOME would be popular and useful.

I don't really like forums or mailing lists for technical questions -- they don't tend to be very searchable, and thus the same questions get asked again and again.  Stack Exchange's reputation and badge system encourages participation, with the highest quality answer "floating" to the top of the response list.  Threaded forums and mailing lists are simply not organized for these kinds of high-quality results.

I suspect it would be easy to suggest a GNOME Stack Exchange on Area 51 (http://area51.stackexchange.com/) and get enough participation to keep it alive beyond the beta phase.  However, Stack Exchange is not open-source, so that may not be the best fit.

Ask Libre Office (http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/questions/) seems to has had good results with AskBot (https://askbot.com/), which is GPL 3 and can even be hosted on their servers for a fee.

As a GNOME developer, I would probably use such a service every day.

-- Jim

On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 9:31 AM, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 6:25 AM, meg ford <meg387 gmail com> wrote:

We have the non-official GNOME Forums already[1]. Hosting something else ourselves seems like a waste. Am I missing something?


[1]http://forums.worldofgnome.org/

The problem is that they are unofficial.  The reason they were put in place is to prove that there is an audience for forums as there was some doubt on whether forums were going to be effective.  In my estimation I think forums have worked out fairly nicely and that if it was moved into an official capacity that it would be even more successful.  However, we haven't made that decision yet.

 

On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 8:18 AM, James <purpleidea gmail com> wrote:

On Thu, 2013-06-20 at 15:08 +0200, Alexandre Franke wrote:
>
> The Stack exchange software (used by Stack overflow) is proprietary. I
> think Ubuntu used to have their instance hosted there.
>
> There is AskBot (http://askbot.org/) which is a free software
> alternative. It seems to be used by Fedora
> (https://ask.fedoraproject.org/) and we could run that on our servers.
>
> Solace (http://opensource.plurk.com/solace/) is another possibility.
>
> > We could possibly just point people to
> > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/gnome-3 or
> > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/gnome
>
> Relying on a third party hosted, non free software tool when there is
> a viable free software alternative doesn't seem very in line with the
> GNOME philosophy.

+1, askbot seems nice. Good idea!

James

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