[yt-dev] Asking questions on StackOverflow

Elizabeth Tasker tasker at astro1.sci.hokudai.ac.jp
Sun Nov 17 05:48:48 PST 2013


Hi Nathan and Matt,

I've never used SO (or indeed heard of it until I saw the twitter thread) and I'm very open to being convinced of its merits.

However, I'm also a bit concerned about fragmenting our Q&A. For example, if I have a problem with yt, one of the first things I do is hit the "search the mailing list" box on the doc page.

e.g. http://www.google.com/cse?cx=010428198273461986377%3Axyfd9ztykqm&ie=UTF-8&q=elizabeth+has+a+problem&sa=Search&siteurl=yt-project.org%2Fdocs%2F2.5%2F&ref=yt-project.org%2Fcommunity.html&ss=5151j1127787j37#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=elizabeth%20has%20a%20problem&gsc.page=1

Now that is pretty simple. What is SO offering that beats that? 

Elizabeth 


On Nov 17, 2013, at 10:40 PM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Nathan,
> 
> On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 12:01 AM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I recently subscribed to the [yt] tag on StackExchange.  Now, whenever a
>> question is asked using this tag on any StackExchange site, I will get an
>> e-mail about it, just like if a question is asked on the users or dev list.
>> Currently (as far as I can tell) zero questions have been asked using this
>> tag...
>> 
>> If there are a few others who are interested in subscribing to the tag, I
>> think it might be worthwhile to add StackOverflow to the website and docs
>> where we describe how to get help and also announce on the user’s list that
>> StackOverflow is an alternate place to ask questions.
>> 
>> While this might split the community somewhat - not everyone will be
>> subscribed to StackOverflow and thus might miss useful info - I think moving
>> some helpful suggestions to StackOverflow will massively improve
>> googleability of common yt issues, allowing us to avoid answering the same
>> questions over and over again.
>> 
>> It might also be worthwhile to ask and answer some common yt questions.  Off
>> the top of my head, I think we could at least answer how to load various
>> types of datasets into yt.
> 
> In principle, I'm okay with this.  But I have a few concerns --
> 
> 1) I don't think the tag "yt" can be created unless someone with high
> reputation does so.  (
> http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/create-tags )
> 2) We have well-defined usage metrics that we can quantify based on
> mailing list activity, so this may fragment that.
> 3) Many of the existing contributors and users don't want another inbox.
> 
> *However*.  SO is really quite good for evolving questions and for an
> updateable reference.  I do really like that aspect.  But I think we
> may find ourselves getting a bit fragmented -- in fact, what I see as
> being a possible outcome is that if yt does end up growing into an
> interdisciplinary space, we'd see people from non-Astro disciplines
> using it, but retaining our original core audience here.  All your
> points really are good ones.
> 
> I don't know.  Could be awesome.  And, I'd like to see us embrace more
> modern and useful methods of communication and outreach.  So ... I
> guess the experiment could be a good one!
> 
> -Matt
> 
>> 
>> -Nathan
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> yt-dev mailing list
>> yt-dev at lists.spacepope.org
>> http://lists.spacepope.org/listinfo.cgi/yt-dev-spacepope.org
>> 
> _______________________________________________
> yt-dev mailing list
> yt-dev at lists.spacepope.org
> http://lists.spacepope.org/listinfo.cgi/yt-dev-spacepope.org

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.spacepope.org/pipermail/yt-dev-spacepope.org/attachments/20131117/9a1b0b4a/attachment.htm>


More information about the yt-dev mailing list