REAL Software Forums

I'm wondering how many others would be interested in replacing this forum (outdated phpbb) with a StackOverflow Stackexchange, supported by RealSoftware.

http://www.stackoverflow.com

Pros
- The correct answer is obvious (no reading a slew of useless posts)
- Good/Great Questions are voted up
- Unanswered questions can be found quickly using search
- You can login with OpenID
- lots of other good stuff...
- More readable

Cons
- not formatted for iPhone out of the box

You missed a huge big one:
- needing to port all of the existing users & posts to the new system without losing anything

That, IMHO, could be a deal breaker.

Well, you wouldn't have to port everything over. You would leave the old forum as an archive (no write access) and add new post to the new forum.

Would be nice to bring everything over, but hardly worth it. You can tell by the forums, the same questions get asked and answered anyway. So you'd start over with a better system and leave the legacy system as read only.

This is assuming REAL wants to do this

Yes, this is assuming REAL wants to support its users desire for better support/forums tools.

In this case, switching to a StackExchange Forum (StackOverFlow) is trivial ( anybody entry-level intern can do it ), so no drain on resources. Additionally, you can use the same people to maintain the forum going forward.

Q&A sites should be easy. No reason why, REAL should be using the best tool out there. phpbb doesn't measure up with the more up to date paradigms for Q&A sites.

uh... "USERS DESIRE" is plural.... so far I have seen ONE user advocate this change....

If the only vote so far is for, I'd like to even things up by formally registering my vote against.

Im with Steve and Dave.
Cant see any need.

Not only that.. but have you SEEN that site?

It looks AWFUL...... and IMHO is no where near as sophisticated as "outdated phpbb"


So Jordan.... the correct answer IS obvious........ and that answer is NO

I totally agree with DaveS. I do not like the looks of the StackOverflow site that was given in the original post to this thread. I do not see any kind of improvement over what we have now. In fact, in my mind, that would be a backward step.

I wouldn't pooh-pooh the idea so fast. This debate strikes me as somewhat disingenuous as different folks have different needs and desires when it comes to finding information. When RS tried to kill the NUG some years ago there were users that absolutely REFUSED to give it up and threatened to walk away from the community if it was killed because it was their preferred way of searching and getting information. It was very emotional. It was ugly.

I prefer the forums to the NUG but I still end of up searching the NUG archives on a regular basis because I know some very experienced programmers post exclusively to that list. The forums do, however, have some inherit drawbacks in that its search mechanism isn't great. We see new people struggling to find information in the forums all the time and complain that they don't search first.

The Stack Overflow paradigm of having tags associated with a post is an interesting feature. I have an RSS feed tied to the 'REALbasic' tag and now answer questions in that forum for anything that has RB tagged. Beats me searching for stuff. From my own website, I've been doing RB training videos, and one of the things that I implemented was a tag list so that if someone went to the tag cloud and clicked on "listbox.addrow" any video that used the technique is listed. Beats trying to guess from a title.

One can debate the merits of one way of doing things versus another but in the long run you won't change anyone's opinion. Different strokes for different folks.

Indeed, but the original proposal was not to keep both available, it was:

I would argue that it should have been "in addition to" this forum (and the NUG by extension).

I would also like to formally register my vote against this.

First of all, the StackOverflow design is absolutely awful. About the only benefit it has is the ability to vote for/against each individual comment.

Next, in case nobody else noticed, adding yet another resource is going to spread our talent too thinly. There are some good programmers on the NUG, there are some good programmers here, and everything seems to be nicely handled (I'm not on the NUG, so I can only speak for the forums). Adding yet another resource will only bleed away talent from here and the NUG, without providing much benefit to the new, inevitably-understaffed SO forums.

Finally, trying to port the forums to SO would be a horrendous challenge. It would involve copying & rearranging the data in at least one huge database and probably more; there's a reason people say "always make backups before even upgrading your forum software": because the forum might not make it. If upgrading is such a painful process, what must porting - to a system completely unlike this one - be like?

On a related note, it seems trying to convince a forum's users to switch to another forum software is like beating your head against the wall. The same thing that's happening here happened when I suggested switching the PortableApps.com forums from Drupal to phpBB3. I guess people get attached to the software, perhaps because they mentally identify it with the forum itself.

That's a shame, CF. In my opinion, you are missing RB's finest resource.

You may have technical reasons not to subscribe but if it's just a question of an overflowing mailbox, I'd recommend either setting up mail filters and subscribing or creating a gmail account so you can at least ask questions there.

The NUG knowledge/experience base is awesome.