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I guess you have to go where the people are, but man, I wouldn't want to outsource the knowledge base/forums for a major product to a different company. Seems like a valuable asset to give up.
And IE, up to IE8, used to require a lot of workarounds, so pretty much the whole community has already turned to SO for debugging.
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I think Stack Overflow has been getting worse and worse in recent years. Their community is outright hostile to active discussion. Only directly answerable questions are tolerated. Microsoft is (as always) a few years late to the party.
TBH i didn't know it was for active discussion. It's been purely Q&A in my experience, and I'm OK with that. I think other places, like here, or reddit, better facilitate more freeform discussion. Although I do agree I've noticed a change in community tone and tolerance that i don't like either; I think that's just the nature of it though, of any community. I don't know that it HAS to be that way, but that seems to b…
SO is a great site for the first five years of a developer's career. After that, it's value wanes as the questions become less "how do I do this?" and more "how should I do this?"
Microsoft making a lot of moves that are starting surprise the tech community. it will take some time to convert the generation that grew up with the old closed microsoft, but slowly I believe they will have converts.
I think Stack Overflow has been getting worse and worse in recent years. Their community is outright hostile to active discussion. Only directly answerable questions are tolerated. Microsoft is (as always) a few years late to the party.
StackOverflow should speak up against companies doing this.
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TBH i didn't know it was for active discussion. It's been purely Q&A in my experience, and I'm OK with that. I think other places, like here, or reddit, better facilitate more freeform discussion. Although I do agree I've noticed a change in community tone and tolerance that i don't like either; I think that's just the nature of it though, of any community. I don't know that it HAS to be that way, but that seems to b…
Not all questions have a single, definitive answer. Many engineering questions have trade-offs that need to be evaluated and different people have different experiences with those trade-offs. SO is a great site for the first five years of a developer's career. After that, it's value wanes as the questions become less "how do I do this?" and more "how should I do this?"
The problem is, being a good site for both things would be difficult. There are plenty of places out there that cater to extended discussion within expert groups. Forums have been around in one form or other almost since the dawn of the web. The problem with these is that they're bad at one-shot Q&A (as the answer to a question might be pages after it was asked, or not there at all, or out of date, and it might take you a long time to work this out). This failing is exactly what Stack Overflow is about, and exactly why it's not good for deeper engineering questions.
I'm unfamiliar with the state of IE Web Dev support at the moment, is it currently a good forum for extended discussion?
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Its only 25GB!? I could have this all in Elasticsearch locally!
Deduplication. They zeroed out all the "your question is not relevant because we say so" answers.
It's a shame that the SO community is constantly killing interesting and useful questions, just because "they don't match their format".
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I think Stack Overflow has been getting worse and worse in recent years. Their community is outright hostile to active discussion. Only directly answerable questions are tolerated. Microsoft is (as always) a few years late to the party.
When it was young you could find veteran wizards who answered all sorts of obscure things because it was fun. The last straw for me was seeing a perfectly valid question about video memory in DOS get drive-by closed by some mod.
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All the data is creative commons and Stack Overflow makes complete data dumps available: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange So the trade off (going where the users are vs. the assets) doesn't seem that bad.
Sure, but it's all anonymized, and not current (at least 8 weeks old). Is customer service a core functionality? Maybe not for some of the software for which support is being moved to SO. SO is a for profit company which took venture capital, so it's not like this is an open source project that MS can influence or co-opt if they need to. Note that I've never been in charge of a large product like this, so take my opi…
Such a bad idea. The format of StackOverflow is very tightly defined. I bet all support questions don't fit that format. Then what? StackOverflow should speak up against companies doing this.
The announcement makes it seem that they are proud of how many questions are out there about IE issues.