[MonoTouch] Forum - Why not StackOverflow.com?

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello John,

     I love StackOverflow, and I think that a lot of people are  
already getting some of their questions answered on StackOverflow, but  
I get the feeling from looking at how Unity runs their forums and how  
Ubuntu runs their forums that the forums are aimed more at discussion.

     For example, Unity has a couple of forums: social discussion/ 
gossip;   Announcements;   "I got my app on the AppStore"; Job  
postings and a few others, and those do not seem to fit well with  
either a mailing list, or StackOverflow.

Miguel.

On Oct 3, 2009, at 5:47 AM, John Mandia wrote:

> 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
>>
>
>
>