As much as I like our forum, I think it is worth asking whether how-to questions around Nim should go on Stack Overflow instead given how SO activity is used as a metric of how active a project is. We get a slow trickle of questions on SO but our forum is more active and joining forces could help bring more visibility to Nim as well as give our users the ability to grow their reputation there.
I'm not really a fan of splitting our forum community but still consider it worthwhile to debate this question. I know other projects have also had this debate and gone in a variety of ways but want to see how the Nim community wants to handle it.
Following are recent, examples, of, posts that could be handled on SO instead.
The way I see it, we could use:
Thanks in advance.
Sorry but I disagree with this approach. I don't think we should be optimizing for a metric that somebody made up for programming language popularity.
How would this even work? Would we ban users for posting questions on our forum and tell them to use SO? I don't think that would make anyone happy. It would be more work for us to moderate and it would alienate newbies.
This is like using Github for source control. We could always host our own instance but you get to tap into a larger community by using such tools.
I'm not asking for anything drastic or any enforcement, simply that we build an active presence there and encourage our users to post questions there so that the community is more accessible.
The metric improving is simply a side effect then.
I'm not asking for anything drastic or any enforcement, simply that we build an active presence there and encourage our users to post questions there so that the community is more accessible.
Depends what you mean by "encourage our users to post questions there". For what it's worth I was planning to query SO for unanswered questions (same for Reddit) and embed links to them on this forum but I just ran out of time. I might still do that though and that would encourage us to answer more questions there.
StackOverview is a nice page where I found already many useful answers with google, mostly concerning mathematics and algorithm.
But what may make people really angry is polluting it with hundreds of plain Nim questions as user voodu did about a year ago like
Generally, when special communities exists, as for themes like LaTex, GTK, Gentoo-Linux it may make not much sense to post many questions from the same person there.
But for single questions, when people do not want to register to Nim forum for that, stackoverflow may be ok. And with some luck smart people like Mr Felsing or Mr Behrends may even answer it.