Why we should choose Stack Overflow instead of Mailing lists for Open Source support
18 Jan 2012This is a very opinionated blog post about why we should use Stack Overflow instead of mailing lists for open source support. This post doesn’t reflects the opinion of the company that I work for and I also didn’t receive any kind of benefit from Stack Exchange or its partners. As you may notice, I’m not an english native speaker, so if you find an gramatical or any error that may be related with a bad explanation, please provide some feedback in the commentaries. I will correct/explain better it as soon as I can.
In the past few months, I spent some time answering some questions about Devise on Stack Overflow and I found out that it is an awesome web application to ask and answer questions regarding open source projects (and everything else). I also try to follow some mailing lists of my favoured projects, but I realized how open source support works better on Stack Overflow than on Mailing Lists.
But firstly, what is Stack Overflow?
Stack Overflow is a free (as in free beer) Q & A website about programming, so if you have a doubt, uncertainty, problem or question about a library, framework or programming language, you can ask it there and there is a good chance for you to get an answer about it. It was the first site of Stack Exchange, a collection of 76 sites about a lot of subjects including System Administration, Cooking, Startups, Gaming, Sci Fi, Firearms and a lot of other websites about a lot of stuff.
But why is it so famous? Well, It is not a simple Q & A website. Given a question and a answer, you can give a +1 to the answer if it is useful or a -1 otherwise. You can also accept an answer for a question you asked, that is, you believes that a given answer was correct or solved the problem that you had. You can also assign a tag to your question, and some people who follow that tag may be able to answer it. You can also attribute a bounty for questions users find relevant but hasn’t received any good answers (and this bounties are basically points, which I will explain later on this text). Besides this, you can comment on questions and answers to ask more information about it, without having to pollute the answers with this. Needless to say that if your question doesn’t fit with the question policy it will be closed without mercy.
It also doesn’t have a “Big Brother” team that moderates questions: all questions are moderated by the community. But not all members can moderate questions: when contributing with questions or answers you may receive points, and depending of the number of points that you have, you gain some trust and some “power” become available for you. In the beginning you can only ask and answer questions but after some points you can edit questions and answers, assign bounties, comment on questions or answer and even moderate questions and answers. You can also earn badges, based on goals. In summary, you earn trust and power through desert. Ask wise questions and provide great answers and you gain power. Promote or post spam, off-topic or flamewars and you will be banned.
Well, IMHO, I find it awesome. A lot of questions get answered in reward of points and badges that can make a lot of people (including recruiters) hear your name. This number of points, also appear besides your name on every question that you answer, which provides you more credibility. It is nothing more than a “gamificated” and improved internet forum that works.
But what about Mailing Lists? Mailing lists exists in a long time and became very popular with Yahoo groups and Google groups among other famous options. They’re very easy to use (just a matter of sending and replying to e-mails) but they do lack of a good search tool (it is not easy to find a question about something with only a naïve text field search) and usually have problems with off-topic discussions and , spam and flamewars. Ok, this is a human problem, but well moderated communities tend to have less problems with that matter. Also, e-mails aren’t a good place to discuss about code: the lack of a source code formatting turns very difficult to read it. The moderations is also difficult: you can’t remove an e-mail after it was received by the list, so irrelevant or off-topic questions may get more repudiating replies and attention than well founded questions about topics that really matter. Although they’re not great for support, they’re great to ask opinions and provide discussions and even announce new versions.
So, I’m not suggestions that we should stop using discussion lists. I’m only suggesting that we may reduce its scope to not accept (or accept and recommend posting it on Stack Overflow next time) support questions (some open source software already have two lists to avoid questions being asked on the development mailing list, which may be used for discussions about the development of the software, e.g. MongoDB-user and MongoDB development for support question), so it is only a matter of encourage users to send questions to Stack Overflow instead of posting on the support list.
To summarize, we have two options: one that seems to be outdated and its search only based on full-text search, without giving relevance to the content (as tags do), and not easily moderated. And another that provides support to source code formatting, tag assignment (and tags may have more relevance than words on a text) and that can be easily moderated. Other great advantage: we may sort the answers by the sum of all scores, so the answer that gets the biggest number of +1 (and is probably more useful than the others), will appear first. In contrast, there isn’t anyway to say that an answer solves your problem on a mailing list without having to send a message and the mail thread starts to get difficult to read.
So. here is an idea: why don’t we stop using it for support and only use it for discussion or announcements? OK, users may not like this at first and we may think about a smoothly transition, but in long term, we may have better resources to find questions and to follow a tag and answer questions about it.
What do you think about this? Would you use it for your open source project support?
EDIT: Fixed some broken links