[MonoTouch] Forum - Why not StackOverflow.com?

[John Mandia]

Hi Miguel,

I've given some thought to this as well :)

Rather than a specific MonoTouch.NET Forum why not have StackOverflow.com be the place where people ask questions? I'm sure you can ask Jeff if you could a have a space on the page when MonoTouch tagged questions appear (for notifications, links to the product to buy/try it etc) in exchange for directing more traffic to his site (not that he needs it :) ).

Why StackOverflow instead of http://monotouch.net/forums or adding it to http://www.go-mono.com/forums/ (which I have used in the past and like)?

Well here are a few reasons:

1) Traffic - StackOverflow has a lot of traffic and these are not just .NET developers. Having lots of MonoTouch questions on there will mean it is more likely to get noticed by non-MonoTouch developers. They may be intrigued enough to visit the official site, try the eval and perhaps even buy the product. The end result would be more users and a larger MonoTouch community.

2) The StackOverflow forum is an improvement over your typical forum and it seems to work well (given it's popularity).

3) Source of knowledgeable people. Building a MonoTouch app requires knowledge of C#, the .NET/Mono framework, the iPhone SDK, and even potentially Objective-C. A MonoTouch forum may have lots of users but they are likely to be MonoTouch developers. On StackOverflow you may get questions answered by people who don't even use MonoTouch but are able to answer the question because they are a .NET or iPhone (Objective-C) developer.

4) Kudos - strange reason I know. StackOverflow has a good reputation/badge system. It will encourage others to answer questions since it builds up their reputation (they may already use StackOverflow for other projects or technologies) and it is increasingly being used by employers to get an idea of how good a person is.

There are some negatives:

1) You lose control since it is not your site

2) You don't own the content (although you can re-use it as long as you refer back to stackoverflow.com http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/)

I think the positives outweigh the negatives but at the end of the day it is your call :) If you do decide to host your own forum then I would recommend using the StackOverflow forum system since it seems to work well with devs :)

Thanks for your time.

John

--- On Fri, 10/2/09, Miguel de Icaza <miguel at novell.com> wrote:

> From: Miguel de Icaza <miguel at novell.com>
> Subject: Re: [MonoTouch] Forum
> To: "Craig Fecteau" <craig.fecteau at loop101software.com>
> Cc: monotouch at lists.ximian.com
> Date: Friday, October 2, 2009, 11:48 PM
> Hello,
> 
>     We are setting up official forums on
> MonoTouch.net in the next
> couple of days.
> 
> > I've just setup a forum that we can use to discuss
> MonoTouch topics.
> > The mailing list is really helpful but sometimes it's
> hard to go
> > searching through posts from the past.  Figured a
> forum might help
> > with that :)
> > 
> > I use a free forum service I've never actually used
> before so some
> > feedback would be great!
> > 
> > You can get to the forums at: http://monotouch.vanillaforums.com
> > 
> > If there is enough usage I can setup a new forum
> hosted on my server.
> > Figured I'd go the free route first just to save time
> and gauge
> > interest. 
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Craig
> > _______________________________________________
> > MonoTouch mailing list
> > MonoTouch at lists.ximian.com
> > http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/monotouch
> 
> _______________________________________________
> MonoTouch mailing list
> MonoTouch at lists.ximian.com
> http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/monotouch
>