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Dear StackExchange: Thank You

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Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#41

Post by Ideka »

EvilTerran wrote: post #33
4ad wrote: post #9

No thanks from me. The no discussions rule means the only questions on the site are the trivial questions that could be answered by reading some documentation. If questions are broad or open ended, the value lies in the discussion, not in any particular answer. I also found that many accepted answers are blatantly wrong, or encourage very poor practice. Sure, the StackExchange network is better than experts-exchange…

Likewise. I usually only end up searching the web-in-general for answers when the product documentation doesn't help. When that's led me to stackexchange, more often than not the threads asking my exact question have been closed as "too general" or similar. The most recent example, in my case, was: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10166086/good-examples-of... "Can anybody recommend some [PHP] programs for me to loo…

The post has two other questions:

what are the best practices when it comes to PHP?

And are there recommended ways of tackling certain task?

And these are, I believe, ambiguous, vague and overly broad (not to mention subjective).

Also the third question, the one you quote, is actually a yes/no question that would be pointless to answer. So, assuming that's not the real question... what is? I believe it IS difficult to tell what is being asked here.

StackExchange is just not meant for discussion, I think. At last not as it is right now.

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#42

Post by patrickg »

simonsarris wrote: post #27

I participate in the SO community a lot (I'm top answer-er for the Canvas tag and HTML5 tag). It's not quite a "community", though, because while I have a lot of respect for the other answer-ers I don't really get to interact with them very much, aside from complimenting a novel solution and the like. I sort of wish there were more methods for interaction (the chat channels don't help that much for niche tags). And w…

I am a tex.stackexchange.com regular and I really like the community. It is a small community but/therefore quite some people meet on a regular basis, the (local) TUG conferences. I agree very much with the "thank you sx" note.

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#43

Post by EvilTerran »

Ideka wrote: post #41
EvilTerran wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise. I usually only end up searching the web-in-general for answers when the product documentation doesn't help. When that's led me to stackexchange, more often than not the threads asking my exact question have been closed as "too general" or similar. The most recent example, in my case, was: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10166086/good-examples-of... "Can anybody recommend some [PHP] programs for me to loo…

The post has two other questions: what are the best practices when it comes to PHP? And are there recommended ways of tackling certain task? And these are, I believe, ambiguous, vague and overly broad (not to mention subjective). Also the third question, the one you quote, is actually a yes/no question that would be pointless to answer. So, assuming that's not the real question... what is? I believe it IS difficult t…

The one I quoted is a yes/no question only if you ignore the norm of answering "Can anybody recommend [thing]?" as if it were "What examples of [thing] do you know of?". That's obviously the intention behind the question -- if you asked your waiter "Can you recommend a wine?", and s/he replied only "yes", that'd make hir both pedantic and deliberately unhelpful.

And the existence of the other questions is beside the point -- the title of the question is "Good examples of PHP code for an intermediate PHPer?", the body is merely exposition. I only quoted the equivalent question from the body because it had better grammar than the title.

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#44

Post by dbecker »

bp_ wrote: post #13
4ad wrote: post #9

No thanks from me. The no discussions rule means the only questions on the site are the trivial questions that could be answered by reading some documentation. If questions are broad or open ended, the value lies in the discussion, not in any particular answer. I also found that many accepted answers are blatantly wrong, or encourage very poor practice. Sure, the StackExchange network is better than experts-exchange…

SE is not meant to be a replacement for reddit or traditional forums. If you want to have discussion by all means have discussion. Just don't do it on SE because SE wasn't made for discussion. Just because echo doesn't read from files doesn't mean it's useless. If you need to read from files you just use cat instead. Sure, you can coerce both to do the other's job, but it'll be messy and only work half the time and o…

The problem is that the quality of participants/knowledge on the discussion sites simply isn't as good as SE.

No knock on SE. Quite the opposite.

But I frequently have questions that aren't SE style questions, and I wish I knew where to take them for such intelligent and informed responses.

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#46

Post by billforsternz »

EvilTerran wrote: post #33
4ad wrote: post #9

No thanks from me. The no discussions rule means the only questions on the site are the trivial questions that could be answered by reading some documentation. If questions are broad or open ended, the value lies in the discussion, not in any particular answer. I also found that many accepted answers are blatantly wrong, or encourage very poor practice. Sure, the StackExchange network is better than experts-exchange…

Likewise. I usually only end up searching the web-in-general for answers when the product documentation doesn't help. When that's led me to stackexchange, more often than not the threads asking my exact question have been closed as "too general" or similar. The most recent example, in my case, was: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10166086/good-examples-of... "Can anybody recommend some [PHP] programs for me to loo…

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. The mods are power crazed and addicted to closing questions. If people are answering, and upvoting those answers, or the question, then the question is worthy and shouldn't be closed. End of story.

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#47

Post by EvilTerran »

robbles wrote: post #35
EvilTerran wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise. I usually only end up searching the web-in-general for answers when the product documentation doesn't help. When that's led me to stackexchange, more often than not the threads asking my exact question have been closed as "too general" or similar. The most recent example, in my case, was: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10166086/good-examples-of... "Can anybody recommend some [PHP] programs for me to loo…

In my opinion, that IS an ambiguous question. Not in the sense that it's hard to understand approximately what you're looking for, but that it's not obvious how to choose the right answers. I agree that this kind of moderation can be a bit heavy-handed, but I think one of the goals of SO is to have provably correct solutions to questions, not an "answer wiki" like Quora. You can't really "accept the right answer" to…

I wouldn't say "ambiguous". I'll grant you "subjective".

Does stackexchange forbid questions where there's an element of opinion, because the system's set up only for questions with "one right answer"? That seems awfully restrictive in the name of a system limitation.

Especially as, as 4ad observed, the asker chooses an incorrect answer annoyingly often -- so the "best answer" isn't always actually the best. As such, it's advisable to at least flick through the other answers anyway, despite this rule.

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#48

Post by bp_ »

SteveJS wrote: post #18
bp_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SE is not meant to be a replacement for reddit or traditional forums. If you want to have discussion by all means have discussion. Just don't do it on SE because SE wasn't made for discussion. Just because echo doesn't read from files doesn't mean it's useless. If you need to read from files you just use cat instead. Sure, you can coerce both to do the other's job, but it'll be messy and only work half the time and o…

It's not the software it's the community. Here's the exact same software with a community that tolerates a list: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/4994/fundamental-examples That said the community+software is good at what it does. I can be sad it's intolerant of lists without needing to disparage it further.

It's really the software. It isn't made to host lists. Votes on lists are historically on the item (OMG YES JQUERY!!!!!), not on the answer (You should use jQuery because a. b. c. d.), and that isn't how the rest of the site works.

Besides in a Q&A network, a "list question" has "list answers" where every "answer" is a "list", rather than an item of that list. Even that doesn't really work because that's not historically the way the site is actually used.

See also the following for the rationale:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/real-questions-have-an...

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#49

Post by bp_ »

EvilTerran wrote: post #47
robbles wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, that IS an ambiguous question. Not in the sense that it's hard to understand approximately what you're looking for, but that it's not obvious how to choose the right answers. I agree that this kind of moderation can be a bit heavy-handed, but I think one of the goals of SO is to have provably correct solutions to questions, not an "answer wiki" like Quora. You can't really "accept the right answer" to…

I wouldn't say "ambiguous". I'll grant you "subjective". Does stackexchange forbid questions where there's an element of opinion, because the system's set up only for questions with "one right answer"? That seems awfully restrictive in the name of a system limitation. Especially as, as 4ad observed, the asker chooses an incorrect answer annoyingly often -- so the "best answer" isn't always actually the best. As such,…

No, opinion is welcome (on Stack Exchange, not necessarily on Stack Overflow) but it needs to be backed up by research or fact.

That's not the problem on the sample question.

Re: Dear StackExchange: Thank You

#50

Post by stan_rogers »

diminish wrote: post #40

I suddenly expected something like a financial package as present somehow; am too naive. that said, stack exchange is really life saver.

There can be a bit of that as well. I got the swag from both english.SE (both the "stackchange" and "stackexchange" tee-shirt as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) and photo.SE (logo tee-shirt and a logo Spudz lens cloth), along with the two Joel-signed letters, a bunch of stickers and Sharpies and such, but that's not always where it ends.

Photo.SE, for instance, has a program where one can be reimbursed for equipment rentals if you write a review/how-to of the equipment for the blog (with prior approval). Of course, only one person gets the nod for any given item, but it's a great way to try a new lens or piece of studio equipment at little or no cost, and provides an educational resource for the community at the same time. It's not a program that scales well—very few of the other SE sites are nearly as focused on tools (pardon the pun)—but it's definitely the kind of touch that makes SE different. Others will (partially) reimburse for conference attendance and that sort of thing, provided that you've made a significant contribution to the site and come back with the goods.

It's just token stuff in the grand scheme of things (the odd fifty bucks here or a hundred bucks there, and not very often) but those are the kinds of tokens that make a difference.

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