Wild idea: Require all StackOverflow worthy questi...

# meta

[louiscad]

Wild idea: Require all StackOverflow worthy questions to be asked on StackOverflow first, and have their link put there with a short snippet here that summarizes the question/issue.

[okarm]

If that was to be allowed, require at least a month old question to prevent spray-and-pray and force the questioner to do their own research. If after a month the answer to their question is still unknown, it might be worth looking at.

The majority of that noise comes in the form of inane beginner level questions that have been asked - and more importantly answered and indexed by search engines - a million times before.

[louiscad]

I disagree with requiring a month, it's way too long for blocking issues and defeats the purpose of using a chat.

What we want is to discourage beginner level questions while still giving the luxury of near realtime handling for interesting, unique or new problems or questions.

The idea behind requiring posting on StackOverflow is feeding search engines and have us all benefit from it, and avoid repetitive questions.

Also @hhariri, if you think it'd be beneficial to have more content on StackOverflow, here's a non mutually exlusive idea: JetBrains could offer some goodies raffles or public recognition like it's done for surveys or top issue reporters. That'd incentivize folks (including me) to post on StackOverflow the problems they struggle or struggled with.

[hhariri]

Sorry, maybe I’m missing context. Can you explain the reasoning behind this?

[louiscad]

Slack is currently not indexed on search engines such as Google, and it's more straightforward to ask a question than search for its answer in the Slack search bar apparently. This leads to duplicate or beginner level questions that can deter people that would be interested in topics that are more in depth.

So I was thinking that incentives and/or rules to search, and ask on StackOverflow if no answer found, then post in Slack, would improve the knowledge accessible from search engines, and would make more space for interesting topics in channels such as #general or #coroutines.

One exception might be issues/questions involving stuff only found in EAP/milestone/beta/alpha releases of Kotlin or kotlinx libs, where issues found might be outdated quite quickly, and where using just Slack could be okay.

[hhariri]

Why SO and not Kotlin forums for instance?

[louiscad]

StackOverflow is optimized for answering thanks to its voting system, while forums keep the chronological order.

Now, I think promoting use of the Kotlin forum for ideas might be a good thing and might help birth of OSS collaboration and other things that are not so efficient in Slack on the long run.

[Colton Idle]

I do find it sad that there are many great questions here that get answers that will never be found. 😢