[MonoTouch] Forum - Why not StackOverflow.com?

[Jon Dick]

I like the idea of forums as well.  There's a much better opportunity for a
strong sense of community and sharing amongst developers in a forum.
Stackoverflow is awesome, and has its place, but I for one feel more
compelled to check a forum daily and answer more questions and share amongst
other users who i feel more of a connection to.

Glad to see this is coming, and it being an official forum means it'll
likely be adopted at a faster rate.  I'll be one of the first to sign up :)


---
Jon D (aka Redth)


On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 8:40 PM, Miguel de Icaza <miguel at novell.com> wrote:

> 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
> >>
> >
> >
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> MonoTouch mailing list
> MonoTouch at lists.ximian.com
> http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/monotouch
>
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