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>discussion Ooooh, You used the d word! Closed because Stack overflow is not for discussion. What SO needs is a forum - not an ephemeral chat but a forum whos

>discussion Ooooh, You used the d word! Closed because Stack overflow is not for discussion. What SO needs is a forum - not an ephemeral chat but a forum whose topics can be linked to the questions that people want to discuss.

mehrdadn 9y ago
Mm in my view they don't need a forum, they just need to get out of the way of the community. The tools are all there; they've designed them well. It's just their imposition of arbitrary unhelpful rules that's the problem.
oldcynic 9y ago
No, please don't push things out to a forum - few would use a forum and it doubles the pages a searcher has to check to see if they've got the appropriate question/answer. A lot of the time if there's many comments on a question or answer it's because there's some nuance that needs to be brought out or the answer has limitations etc. Someone arriving from search probably needs and wants to know that - and will take but a moment to decide if the comments look worthwhile enough to expand and read more. SO displays it well enough technically by only picking out the top 4 or 5 comments. What SO needs is the mods leaving the comments well alone unless they're abusive or spam.
- shagie 9y ago
  Stack Overflow has had problems with too many comments. In https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/204402/hide-trivial-comments https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/204402/hide-trivial... there is a question about how much comments cost in terms of signal to noise. Do comments make finding good answers further down on the page harder to find? Do they make good answers get less votes? Note that in that post, everyone who has a diamond after their name is a StackOverflow employee.
svick 9y ago
One of the reasons SO was created was because programming forums didn't work well enough for Q&A. And I think SO did succeed at doing that. I don't think tacking on a forum is the right way to make it even better.
tedmiston 9y ago
> What SO needs is a forum - not an ephemeral chat but a forum whose topics can be linked to the questions that people want to discuss. That's kind of what Meta is. https://meta.stackoverflow.com https://meta.stackoverflow.com

mehrdadn 9y ago

Mm in my view they don't need a forum, they just need to get out of the way of the community. The tools are all there; they've designed them well. It's just their imposition of arbitrary unhelpful rules that's the problem.

oldcynic 9y ago

No, please don't push things out to a forum - few would use a forum and it doubles the pages a searcher has to check to see if they've got the appropriate question/answer. A lot of the time if there's many comments on a question or answer it's because there's some nuance that needs to be brought out or the answer has limitations etc. Someone arriving from search probably needs and wants to know that - and will take but a moment to decide if the comments look worthwhile enough to expand and read more. SO displays it well enough technically by only picking out the top 4 or 5 comments. What SO needs is the mods leaving the comments well alone unless they're abusive or spam.

shagie 9y ago
Stack Overflow has had problems with too many comments. In https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/204402/hide-trivial-comments https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/204402/hide-trivial... there is a question about how much comments cost in terms of signal to noise. Do comments make finding good answers further down on the page harder to find? Do they make good answers get less votes? Note that in that post, everyone who has a diamond after their name is a StackOverflow employee.

svick 9y ago

One of the reasons SO was created was because programming forums didn't work well enough for Q&A. And I think SO did succeed at doing that. I don't think tacking on a forum is the right way to make it even better.

tedmiston 9y ago

> What SO needs is a forum - not an ephemeral chat but a forum whose topics can be linked to the questions that people want to discuss. That's kind of what Meta is. https://meta.stackoverflow.com https://meta.stackoverflow.com