Should we have a stack overflow "sprint" push?

#1

There are 1,151 unanswered questions on Stack Overflow [ edit: turns out it’s actually about 2,444 ] about Ember, some of them extending far far back (many years) into the past.

I wondered something today. I looked at stack overflow’s Ember section and thought to myself… “I wonder if the whole community got together and did a push, could we answer all the questions and then maintain them being answered?”

We get a lot of complaints that people feel like their questions aren’t heard, answered or acknowledged on stack overflow… and we have an amazing community… how to connect these two up better? I wonder if we could band together a group of stack overflow maintainers who answer questions regularly, or even just take one question per week, taken in turns… to end up with a really fast turn around on questions?

Just a musing…

#2

Will be great if somebody would start doing that.

There are quite a few unanswered posts even on this forum :neutral_face:

#3

Several of us have been doing that for quite a while… :slight_smile: Come join the party! :smile:

Interesting to note, perhaps is that this forum isn’t a question/answer type application, though. That’s what stack overflow is for. This forum is for discussion (hence the name). Discussion doesn’t usually necessarily arrive at any particular answers or results… there’s a bit of a difference.

The main thrust of starting this as a discussion topic is to rally people (such as your fine self) to help get the numbers of unanswered questions down… I think if people feel happy to ask questions there because they feel like they’ll get answered and heard, it’ll improve the community immensely.

#4

I’ve bing doing community work on SO for more then 6 months straight last year intuitivepixel but then got a new full time employment which reduced my free time, I might start such a SO clean up :slight_smile: who want’s to join the task force :slight_smile:

#5

@intuitivepixel you’re a legend! :smile: I would love it if there was a group of us that did two things:

  1. Take a few minutes to answer stack overflow questions regularly (can be just one a week, but one a day would be great…). 1 a… see if we can get as many questions closed as possible. A lot of them are just dead, sitting there because they’re out of date, or just not answered. I’ve been slowly trying to encourage people to either answer them themselves, or provide updates or something.
  2. Evangelized others to regularly answer a stack overflow quesiton in their spare time. That is, wherever possible kinda trying to get new people asking questions, but also answering them as soon as they’re able.

To new people, it feels a bit like you get lost and not heard when asking stack overflow questions at the moment. It’s kind of really important for us all to do, as well, because it lets us see the kinds of problems that are happening for new people.

Obviously the more people we can bring to this, the easier it’ll be. I’d love for this to be baked into our community… that is, for the main site to encourage this behaviour on the same level as contribution. Also, for us all to regularly help out, because then it’d be so easy to do… it’d just be like answering one question a month each or less if we were all doing it.

If people’s questions are being answere more, then that means more activity and more uptake of Ember.

<3