IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow | Hacker News Reader

IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

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289 pointsdjug201 comments

Microsoft making a lot of moves that are starting surprise the tech community. it will take some time to convert the generation that grew up with the old closed microsoft, but slowly I believe they will have converts.

I think Stack Overflow has been getting worse and worse in recent years. Their community is outright hostile to active discussion. Only directly answerable questions are tolerated. Microsoft is (as always) a few years late to the party.

I am a mod on a similarly hostile StackExchange site. The community has always been outright hostile to active discussion (outside of chat, the area of the site for specifically this) for all but a brief period when it was still working out what it was. The fact it's hostile to active discussion is part of what enables it to continue to be a useful resource.

That's not to say Stack Overflow isn't without its problems, but it's more the hostility (something which we're trying to address[1]) that's the problem than the stance against active discussion.

[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-...

Yeah, I agree. I think it's actually fantastic that they focus so narrowly on answerable questions. It's still a super useful resource, and a tight focus means it will probably be able to stay on track for a long long time.

However, I wish there was a place as fantastically focused on good discussion.

Isn't Jeff Atwoods working on Discourse right now?

A good online community comes from the users and the management, not the software.

Isn't Discourse software aimed at improving internet forums rather than a discussion venue in itself? It's not comparable to stackexchange, which is software plus a community.

But stack-everything only has such a vibrant and focused community because community rules have been made as clear as they have. If you go through Jeff Atwoods blog, you'll see that they are making the same considerations for Discourse, which has it's own "community rules" that ship with it. They're not only writing better forum software, they're also investigating what makes great forums great and horrible forums horrid and they're baking it into their product.

What do you think about Quora?

That hiding answers to people who aren't logged in is user-hostile.

Isn't that the spammy site that insists you log in to view answers? I always took it as another Experts Exchange.

Wait, these are different sites??

The "?share=1" guys? Mostly useless.

What exactly does it do? And is this a bad practice?

>What exactly does it do?

It does this:

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/43179/how-can-i-r...

And it's officially supported:

https://blog.quora.com/Making-Sharing-Better

But you still need to sign up/in in to casually browse.

>And is this a bad practice?

It's pretty user hostile which is why I personally never used the site.

Targets a different audience with different kinds of questions.

Wouldn't this be easily solved by adding a "discussion" link from the question page to a wiki/forum page for more free-form or reddit-vote style questions?

On the other hand, in the past few years I've found that all of the most useful Stack Overflow or P.SE pages I've found when Googling for information have turned out to be questions with 25+ upvotes, with answers having 50ish upvotes. And all closed as "not constructive."

It's certainly staying on track, but it's worth noting that many track-related analogies are pejoratives that focus on the way that you can't steer vehicles that go on tracks. I suspect an inordinate amount of incoming traffic to Stack Exchange is for information that only Stack Exchange apparently thinks (not just by the closing, but by the choice of words in explaining the reason for the closing) is not particularly valuable. Methinks that's evidence that the community governance has become an echo chamber - otherwise one should think that the people running this company would have identified a gap in the market that they could be exploiting by now.

I started slant.co for this.

Closed question: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/2254/what-are...

Open Question: http://www.slant.co/topics/1150/~what-are-the-best-keyboards...

Yeah slant is ok, but still needs more users/moderation to be as useful as SO (even despite questions getting closed). Eg I browse to http://www.slant.co/topics/799/~what-are-the-best-continuous... and it lists 'Visual Studio default theme' as an option with one recommendation. So I signed in but I see no way to tell a mod that it doesn't belong there? (I could add a con saying 'This is not a CI' though)

I'm honestly really sorry about that, we're in the middle of building a flagging system at the moment. Up until now we typically have been using the comment to moderate but this is obviously really inefficient.

I removed that option, thanks for pointing that out. We have a long way to go on the moderation side of things.

Anything else you don't like/wish we had?

Only some minor points, for the rest I really like the interface and functionality:

- it's a tad confusing that in a list with questions every question has 3 links. Two of them are the same (queston title itself 'See All Options') so I'd remove the latter as it doesn't really add anything useful imo.

- it's not clear to me what the 'Best' sorting option means

- a built-in way to link questions wouldn't be bad. For example there's a 'What are the best over-ear headphones under $200?' but also a 'What are the best over/on ear headphones around $300?' and in the latter the Sennheiser HD598 wins while it doesn't in the former. Something like a 'This is Related To' button which then pops up something similar to SO's duplicate question window.

- which reminds me: not sure if it can be done but eventually you'll probably need a way to remove or rather merge duplicates

- just figured that after adding a pro, I still have to vote for it. It would make sense to do this automatically?

(couldn't reply to the child comment)

>Only some minor points, for the rest I really like the interface and functionality:

Thanks :) Do you like what we did with the sources? (example: http://bit.ly/1va9Aj6. The favicons act like tabs if you didn't notice)

Good point. I'll double check with the analytics in the morning and see if we can simplify.

- it's not clear to me what the 'Best' sorting option means

It's very opaque at the moment as I'm experimenting with various sorting algorithms almost weekly. Once I nail something down I'll work on the UI transparency.

We're building this! Not only "this is related to" but the ability to easily sync/add pro's from one occurrence of an option to another. (Yep, I'm aware of the potential issues with changing context, it's not going to be an auto sync, more like "suggested pros/cons/sources")

- which reminds me: not sure if it can be done but eventually you'll probably need a way to remove or rather merge duplicates

This is part of the same flagging project I'm in the middle of.

- just figured that after adding a pro, I still have to vote for it. It would make sense to do this automatically?

I keep going back and forth on this. A lot of people add pros/cons to be good community members, not necessarily due to them personally agreeing with them. I think it will end up being a checkbox that's enabled by default.

Thanks so much for taking the time to help us out! I'll keep working away until you describe Slant as "amazing" instead of "ok" :)

(btw if you want to help us shape the product even further we have a meta.slant.co)

> Do you like what we did with the sources?

oh yes, that's nice. Bug (on FF) though: the favicon disappears after having clicked on a tabs.

Your effort/enthusiasm sounds good for the rest :]. I'll check meta.

It's not just about discussion. It's a general stance positioning the perfect against the pretty good. Here's just one example: questions often get closed as duplicate after good answers start rolling in. Sometimes, the new answers are better than the old ones. The mods argue that the users should move their answers over to the old question. Or that they should improve the old answers. It's a lot of should, should, should.

But why are we talking about shoulds that will never get done when a really good answer is already here? You've got users actively providing good content and your response is to reprimand them and tell them that content should be over here instead? You know, we have these things called links on the world wide web. The internet isn't running out of them.

Sometimes it feels like the mods are building a really tidy card catalog at the expense of the books in the collection.

While I'm ranting, I'll just note that the position that there's a canonical way to ask every question and a that there exists a single acceptable answer is a fairly absurd proposition that, once accepted, leads to all kinds of equally absurd behavior.

It's almost like there should be a mechanism when marking a question as a duplicate to automatically move the answers from the new question to the old question... along with a 301 redirect on the removed-as-duplicate URL.

Not sure if that would work since most "duplicate" questions are similar but not identical. Therefore an answer responding to the duplicates' specific use-case would be confusing in the context of the original question. Perhaps include the duplicate question in the answer when it's merged. Hidden behind a link e.g "This answer was posted in response to a duplicate question" and a link to view the content of the duplicate question.

This is by far the worst problem with Stack Overflow. The mods seem to leap at the chance to mark questions that are similar, but not identical, as duplicates.

There's one easy fix for this, and several other problems with SO: Don't close duplicate questions. Just cross-reference them.

Reasons:

  - Gets rid of the "This was closed because of trigger-happy
    moderators failing to distinguish between 'similar' and
    'identical'" problem by making that situation impossible.

  - Improves answer discovery for users: If Google gets you
    to almost, but not quite, the right question, 
    cross-referencing gets you the rest of the way.

  - Improves answer discovery for users: Maybe the best answer
    today isn't the same as the best answer 5 years ago.

  - Improves gamification: Rewards are the lifeblood of
    a site like Stack Overflow.  A way of dealing with
    duplicate questions that rewards users for 
    cross-referencing them is infinitely more in line with
    SE's basic idea than one that punishes them with
    public shaming. 

  - Reduces opportunity for petty bureaucrats to take root.

  - Represents a more thoughtful, measured way of thinking
    about software engineering.  Many questions really can
    have more than one correct answer, or the correct answer
    can depend on subtle details.  Which answer gets the
    green check mark may have as much to do with the situation
    of the asker than the quality of the answer.

Absolutely right. And this is also the way every other bug tracker on the planet works.

(Yes, I think SO looks like a bug tracker used as a discussion forum. They're certainly very close, including hostile project owners, WONTFIX's, etc.)

Interesting observation. Recall that Joel Spolsky got his start with FogBugz, a bug tracker. Think that might have informed the design?

That's exactly what closing duplicates does: cross references it to the original. If someone wants to post new information, they can do it on the original.

Yes, they can. But they won't. (For various reasons, but primarily because it won't get any attention. Nobody likes yelling into the void.)

An alternative to shaming is that you could just accept this great new content that a volunteer is giving you.

There is a badge for exactly that - Necromancer ( http://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/17/necromancer ): Answered a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more.

Whenever a question gets a new post it gets bumped up to the top of the activity again - the same amount of possible attention as when an hour old question gets a new answer too.

Yes. I shouldn't have said nobody. I actually like answering old questions, for example. I've earned that badge 10 times :)

What it really comes down to, though, is that when somebody asks a new question, I want to answer their new question, with all of its subtleties, in response to its particular phrasing, in its context.

It depends on the question. If it previously didn't have an answer or only had one, it goes to the top. If it had 5 OK answers and you add a 6th really awesome one, the ranking doesn't change much - expect it to be totally ignored.

That is not always the case. Consider http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/263542/ in which an answer was posted three years after the question was asked and two years since the last visible answer was posted ( http://programmers.stackexchange.com/posts/65281/timeline ) and is now the second highest answer in the question. That doesn't sound like 'totally ignored'.

I challenge you to find a similar question on StackOverflow. On some of the other, slower StackExchange sites I can see that it might be different.

It does happen. In fact, I think that a couple of my best (and highest-voted) answers are necromancers. However, I should note that the question you linked has 51464 views. And a lot of the questions I've earned necromancer for were similarly well-viewed. That's not typical. Most old questions get a fraction of those views.

Edit: In fact, I should admit that I usually only put the effort into answering old questions when it's something that has a lot of views. It's an indication that the question is linked somewhere prominent or is ranking well for some search terms. Those questions are worth putting the time in for. Most aren't.

It does cross-reference them. But read the rest of my bullet points. It isn't just about cross-referencing. It's about cross-referencing in a way that encourages a vital community that resonates with SE's gamified nature by keeping the site fun for all players.

Closing with a link to the original is cross-referencing in a way that does just the opposite: It decreases the vitality of the community by taking away opportunities for newcomers to take part in the gamification feature.

Let's frame the issue another way: What's Stack Overflow really for? Is it for people to ask questions and get answers? Or is it just a gamified Wikipedia?

It doesn't take a mod to mark as dupe. Five normal users or one with a gold badge in the tag the question is in suffice. Took me a bit by surprise the first time I closed a question with just my own vote.

The number of times I've come across a question that was marked as a dupe, and the linked to question it was "duping" had nothing to do with my issue pretty much means anytime I see an SO link, I know I'm in for a world of hurt, bad answers, and links to no where.

SO has hurt the industry more than helped, I believe.

It reminds me of the Wikipedia "notability" fight from early last decade. The cost of adding an extra page to Stackoverflow/Wikipedia is beyond trivial, there is no reason to restrict additions except to please these mods who want to build a tidy card catalog.

This, and a thousand times this.

If a question gets asked more, maybe having more indexed landing pages for it for search engines will make it easier to find. It seems to be a popular question after all! Why limit yourself to just one answer?

A closed question isn't automatically deleted, so the search engines can still find it. You'll just need to click another link to find the answers.

Theoretically it's better to have all the answers in one place instead of scattered about, so that you can compare and contrast them. In practice it's far from ideal. Often a new question will generate a fresh take on an answer, and the diversity would be welcome.

If there's a subtle difference between the "duplicate" question and the older one, you can edit it to highlight the difference. Unfortunately that's hard to do, and you're unlikely to get the reopen votes even if you do a good job.

I find the different websites they have very confusing. I would use it a lot more if it was a more integrated experience.

I don't think you would. The split between topics allows sites to cultivate communities with strong domain knowledge. In fact, the whole process that sites go through to be created[1] relies on finding such a group to kick the site off. Many sites fail this process, becoming wastelands. Some are eventually shuttered. Those that make it to 'graduation' do so only because they have a community that helps create the content in the first place.

If the sites were merged, this sense of community and ownership would be lost. This is why each site is separate, with a style somewhat picked/influenced by the site's community, with ads chosen by the community, and rules drawn up by the community. Stack Exchange is the sum of many small (and a few big) communities, not one big one.

[1]: https://area51.stackexchange.com/faq

TBH i didn't know it was for active discussion. It's been purely Q&A in my experience, and I'm OK with that. I think other places, like here, or reddit, better facilitate more freeform discussion.

Although I do agree I've noticed a change in community tone and tolerance that i don't like either; I think that's just the nature of it though, of any community. I don't know that it HAS to be that way, but that seems to be the default behavior.

Not all questions have a single, definitive answer. Many engineering questions have trade-offs that need to be evaluated and different people have different experiences with those trade-offs.

SO is a great site for the first five years of a developer's career. After that, it's value wanes as the questions become less "how do I do this?" and more "how should I do this?"

That's spot on. Questions like "How should I do this" are harder to answer, require extended research and investigation, and a lot of communication back and forth. Stack Overflow is not a good platform for this. What it is is a great platform for finding solutions to simply expressed stumbling blocks, or nuggets of domain-specific knowledge.

The problem is, being a good site for both things would be difficult. There are plenty of places out there that cater to extended discussion within expert groups. Forums have been around in one form or other almost since the dawn of the web. The problem with these is that they're bad at one-shot Q&A (as the answer to a question might be pages after it was asked, or not there at all, or out of date, and it might take you a long time to work this out). This failing is exactly what Stack Overflow is about, and exactly why it's not good for deeper engineering questions.

I'm unfamiliar with the state of IE Web Dev support at the moment, is it currently a good forum for extended discussion?

That's kind of what I found codereview and programmers stackexchanges are more useful for. I've also started drifting towards more and more mailing lists for specific discussions on particular topics, though that can be hit or miss depending on the community.

That's calling for "closed as not constructive"?

When it was young you could find veteran wizards who answered all sorts of obscure things because it was fun. The last straw for me was seeing a perfectly valid question about video memory in DOS get drive-by closed by some mod.

Instead of the overzealous closing, why doesn't SO create a "Stack Overflow Opinions" Stack Exchange site where they move the offending questions?

I was one of the early mods on programmers.stackexchange.com that was kinda-sorta aimed at being just that. Some participants wanted explicitly that, where offending questions would be automatically moved to P.SE. Others wanted "anything that'd be off-topic on SO" as the key criteria for P.SE. A lot of the early questions there were pulled directly from previously-closed questions on StackOverflow. Over time, though, P.SE drifted away from that model due largely to pressure from the SO/SE leadership. It was made clear that free-form discussion was not what the StackExchange platform was for- it was for answerable questions.

And I can understand that. There exist a lot of places on the web to discuss technology (e.g., the one we’re commenting on now). Forums, IRC, blogs, and social media site have been around for a long time. They all sucked as a place to get answers. SO/SE built a better solution, and part of that was a strong anti-discussion bias. It worked, and there is now a great place on the internet to get answers instead of the endless morass of vBulletin sites. I can understand them not wanting to mess with a successful formula.

Oh boy, P.SE had some seriously bad birthing pains. Speaking as a former diamond mod on Stack Overflow, I got spanked a few times by a particular former and overbearing P.SE mod for migrating what seemed like perfectly on-topic questions that were clearly not great for SO.

Eventually I gave up and to this day yet I am still unclear what is considered on/off-topic on P.SE.

Back in April there was some discussion on meta.P.SE about updating the help center ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6590/ ) which resulted in some changes ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6604/ ). There's also a post trying to explain the spirit behind all of the reasons and interpretations (and history of those interpretations) the site has of the different close reasons ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/ ). If there is still confusion about what is and isn't on topic, asking another meta question or stopping into P.SE's chat room would likely meet with a good reception.

There once was a site named "crap overflow" doing smth like that, I think (or may be smth different, not sure), pity it got closed long ago.

I agree. Considering most people with IE will be regular computer users and not power users, I can see their questions being downvoted to oblivion and their questions closed.

I consider myself a power user and I already have one account that was "suspended" due to too many downvoted questions of mine.

Absolutely. Given it's a site for programming questions, I would tend to assume that end-user questions would not do well at all.

Perhaps this is why the article mentions using SO for Web Developer support and not end-user support?

The topics being moved to stack overflow are "web development with IE" not "IE web users".

Which is basically what was happening already. Like the article says, over 40k questions are already asked and answered on stack.

It may be getting worse. Not sure. There are definitely a lot of questions that have been marked "closed" or "off topic" that I would genuinely like to have seen more answers to.

The bottom line is that it's still a really important archive of software coding. I'd say 80+ percent of the issues I face in coding, someone has seen before - and therefore, a place like SO could have solved my issue with almost zero time wasted.

People now seem to be afraid to answer for fear of downvotes, and those that do get downvoted go on a witch hunt and downvote anything you've ever posted.

It's terrible.

No problem, SO detects that and reverts their downvotes :)

I think hostility to discussion is what separates SO from reddit. What SO trying to be is not the place to discover new knowledge through discussion, but rather repository of existing knowledge as shared by experts.

That said, anyone wants to start a site oriented specifically towards discussion and discovering new solutions? Just need a workable idea on how to keep discussions from deteriorating into holy flame wars or getting philosophical.

Microsoft will almost certainly get the power to moderate their support section, no?

Nope, not at all. MSFT employees will have to earn reputation just like all the other users. I imagine there's already a few on the site that have gained the usual kinda privileges - vote to close, downvote, flagging etc. And there'll be non-MSFT users who'll be IE tag specialists and already familiar with what is considered an acceptable IE question to ask.

This is correct. We're normal users too. You can track my involvement at http://stackoverflow.com/users/54680/jonathan-sampson.

That's because Stack Overflow is not a discussion forum. It is, in fact, quite the opposite. Think back; remember the time when you actually got usable, timely help on a forum? Can't think of any? I didn't think so. Why? Because forums are flooded with useless, mindless crap, like users who can't be bothered to form complete sentences, who can't be bothered to do fundamental research or learn the most basic skills of their craft, who want someone to write their program for them, and who have an unbridled sense of entitlement.

It's not the discussion Stack Overflow seeks to squelch; it's the noise. Unfortunately, discussion is one of the things that attracts noisy posts, so it's not exactly something that's actively encouraged.

I get useful timely help from forums all the time.

I find voting systems tend to squelch most of the idiots on technically focused forums.

The key difference though is that you got timely help from a forum by asking a question. However, as the next person trying to find the answer to the same question, I would have to wade through multiple forums with pages of answers (the answer you got was on page 3 of 5) with people asking clarification and the tangent from someone else (on page 2) about drivers I care nothing about.

Stack Overflow was designed so that the next person with the same question could find the answer more easily. The next person could avoid having to go through Sun's Java forums, and CodeRanch, and /r/Java, and /r/JavaHelp and the comments of someone's blog post, and ... Too many places with too much tangental knowledge that wasn't well indexed. Despite the idiots and trolls having posts removed,

With Stack Overflow, one knows that if they ask a question there (admittedly, that fits within the focus and quality guidelines) they will get an answer - not someone commenting on another comment that is indistinguishable from an answer (comments vs answers). And if they search Stack Overflow, and find the question that has an answer - it is an answer. That is the key value proposition of Stack Overflow in that the next person who has the same question as you do can find it easily.

I only reach Stack Overflow from Google so its value to me in regulating answer quality is limited. The main thing it did for me was remove bad answer aggregators (expertsexchange and friends) from the front page of Google results.

Make no mistake about it: SO's attention to broken windows was revolutionary. But the system is out of control. For example, comments are now silently deleted because, as one mod told me, SO "is about content, not people." Anybody who thinks a site that relies on volunteer contributions isn't about people is so far down the wrong path it's hard to know what to say to them.

Sadly, I think a site that relies on volunteers to maintain the community standards is doomed to go down that path.

The people who tend to rise in a site that's organized that way are people who devote the most time to volunteering for the site. And volunteering for the site means spending a lot of time reeeeaallllyy focused on a glowing screen. Meaning people who naturally rise to the top in such a community are people who've chosen to devote large portions of their free time to content, not people.

It has turned into something like Reddit, where many people will do everything for points. Some of them also have a very elitist mindset and are hostile towards new users who make mistakes.

I have never understood why people consider Microsoft "Closed". Apple is closed. Microsoft in past too had been extremely open to all sort of partnerships. They built technologies that were relatively ahead of open source world.

Probably because until relatively recently, MS has not open sourced very much or any software, whereas Apple has a number of notable open source projects (LLVM/Clang, Webkit/JSCore, ...). OS X is also build on open source software (BSD, Mach) whereas Windows is not.

There are other reasons too, but those are the biggest ones, I think.

you forgot CUPS, the thing that lets most *nix platforms print.

An outsider's view: Microsoft has long relied on their open-if-you-have-money model (shared source), wherein if you mattered to them, you could pay them money to see the source. Presumably, if you paid them more you might even be able to make changes and use them for your own purposes.

Apple, OTOH, embraced open-source from the beginning (for a given value of embrace). Lots of open-source projects that go fine as long as you do it the Apple way and don't mind them passive-aggressively slowly pulling away, but not enough to kill the project.

I love me some Apple, but let us not pretend that they're saints compared to MS when it comes to actual, existing projects.

Microsoft has been opening up for a decade...its first open source project, WIX Tools, was released in April 2004. ASP.Net MVC source code was released five years ago. Even before that, the CLI was released as an open specification as far back as 2000. Hence Mono.

How about opening up something that really matters like the the Office formats?

Yea, the OOXML fiasco was so bad it is in my wishlist for Satya, though that was from about seven years ago.

> Microsoft making a lot of moves that are starting surprise the tech community.

They've been doing things like this for years now. I think it's more that the tech community is starting to take note of these things that they are doing.

Firstly, bravo. I really applaud Microsoft for realizing what it wanted to have in a Q&A site, and realizing Stack Exchange was that realizing. Then realizing that people are probably going to go to SE, instead of a Microsoft forum or product.

That said, I think Microsoft is going to be in an adapt or die philosophy for the next few months, and I think this is one of those decisions. They know they need to foster a community that anyone can be a part of.

Open Source move? Check. More Open Source? Check. Stack Exchange? Check.

The only thing this piece is missing is a better hardware platform, so I'm going to be very interested in seeing what Microsoft can produce in the coming months.

> The only thing this piece is missing is a better hardware platform, so I'm going to be very interested in seeing what Microsoft can produce in the coming months.

Why? Honestly, I think the Surface tablets and Nokia's Lumia devices are really high quality.

I think the Surface tablets and Nokia's Lumia devices are really high quality.

I agree, I would buy a surface pro if I could get it without windows.

What OS would you want to run on it? I can't think of something better suited. Android apps aren't optimised well for a large tablet and iOS is too focused to work well on a device that is supposed to allow you to replace your laptop. You could run a linux distro but I don't know of many that are touch optimised very well (Ubuntu has something in the works but I read recently it's definitely not ready for primetime yet).

I think Ubuntu touch-based stuff has loooooong been in the works. Unity is a part of it.

I have a touch screen Lenovo laptop I bought my freshman year of college and I put Mint on it. Works pretty well for what I want to do with touch, I can take notes and it supports pressure sensitivity. I haven't had the chance to get my hands on a Pro to test Mint, but that would be my go to.

I used kubuntu. plasma active on a surface 3 is divine.

Maybe I was wrong about Linux then! Are apps optimised in any way? Is this up to devs or does the OS/window manager do any of the work.

I would likely run Ubuntu or LinuxMint. I came really close to buying the system76 Darter Touch when it was available, but the fact that it didn't convert into a tablet was the deal breaker.

Interesting how many responses suggested running Linux. I wouldn't have thought it would even be worth trying on a tablet. First I've seen the system76 Darter Touch. I guess with Unity Ubuntu is quite touch friendly now.

I really think Microsoft could do a much better job at fostering a productive App development ecosystem, which is the heart of a good mobile operating system. My ability to use a mobile device hinges on an expectation of UI and Hardware, but a gold standard of an incredible App environment.

Obviously, Apple has achieved this. Google Play has had some rough spots but is definitely a close second. Then there's the mortal wounds; the Amazon, Samsung and Microsoft App Stores,

That leaves Microsoft as the only company that designs Hardware/OS but still has a terrible App Store. In fact, scams and misleading apps were so bad[0] Microsoft actually had to address them[1].

Don't get me wrong though, if the App Store were better, I would love me some Lumia, but really, when Hardware and OS become a toss-up, really the next thing to look at is the App Store. Microsoft has some great momentum in the right direction now though and I would love for that to continue.

[0] http://www.howtogeek.com/194993/the-windows-store-is-a-cessp... [1] http://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2014/08/27/how-were-ad...

You're absolutely right, the WP appstore really has a lot less to offer than its competitors. It's really frustrating as a WP user to see companies ignoring WP all the time. Honestly, there is no good reason any more to leave WP out, there are multiple really solid cross platform development frameworks out there nowadays.

Tradeoffs (and I'm sure I'm mostly preaching to the choir). Generally, for non-trivial mobile apps, you want to try and build native versions for Android/iOS first. Frameworks that are cross-platform just aren't up to par in many aspects (again, for non trivial apps). While you may be able to get performance close enough to native performance with a cross-platform framework, you're still going to be spending a significant amount of time on the UI/UX side customizing to ensure your app's look, feel and general flow line up with the standards and best practices for that platform. This is not a trivial concern. Facebook found that out the hard way on Android as one example. Users learn and form muscle memory on the platform they choose to invest in and respond very poorly if your app doesn't deliver a UI/UX that adheres nicely to the platform standards. Another concern, which is being addressed, but is going to be an ongoing concern for still some time, is API feature access on each platform. Cross-platform frameworks are continually playing catch-up to try implement access to the most important new API additions on each platform. The gap has certainly been shortened, especially in the location services area but ultimately, there won't be API access parity across platforms for quite some time and it will still lag behind the native implementations.

Again, this is all in general, applies the most to bigger apps and/or apps that rely heavily on fast performance or access to specific native APIs and based on one mobile devs experience.

It is exciting to see that for most things that are somewhere between a blog and a small to non-trivial application, just focusing on making sure your site/small app works well on most mobile browsers is sufficient. You can also usually wrap things up in each platforms' version of a WebView if you want to get your app/site listed on each store for that extra exposure. Again though, you have to be very careful doing that for the same UI/UX concerns mentioned earlier.

Getting away from the more technical aspects, just looking at WP market share vs Android/iOS means that even if a business wants to hit every platform, they're still going to start with iOS/Android and making sure they have a good mobile site experience before looking at WP. Add in the cost of finding a dev to work on your WP build (or assigning one from another team to it) and you end up with only the largest entities having the man-power and expertise to be able to justify a priority list that includes executing nice implementations across all platforms, including WP.

MSDN Social is probably the worst web I've ever used, honestly... The layout is confusing at best.

The answer is attached to the bottom (full length, no see more or anything) of the question and is then repeated again. Threaded comments are also very poorly formatted, and they hit a limit pretty soon from what I've seen.

Not to mention that its slow as hell.

This is great news. In the past we worked with a great group of developer advocates, and I know they spent countless hours answering all sorts of technical questions on Windows development on StackOverflow. Making this official was only the next natural step.

Such a bad idea. The format of StackOverflow is very tightly defined. I bet all support questions don't fit that format. Then what?

StackOverflow should speak up against companies doing this.

I'm guessing StackExchange is partnering with them in this move.

Definitely. It was created by Jeff Atwood who is a very "pro-Microsoft" figurehead in the .NET community so there was probably a lot of collaboration in this move.

True, but Jeff Atwood left SO quite some time ago now.

As catkin has pointed out, Jeff left SE a good while ago. Also his current baby, Discourse [0], is built on Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Redis at the back end and ember.js on the front [1].

[0]: http://www.discourse.org/

[1]: http://www.discourse.org/faq/#tech

AskUbuntu is the place for Ubuntu where Canonical are fully doing it. Microsoft are following suit.

Already partnered - that the "Internet-Explorer" tag already has an image indicates an existing partnership [1]. This may be a deeper partnership though.

1: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/30187/what-do-icons-...

Wouldn't have to be. You don't have to partner with SO to allow folks to ask questions about your product; they just have to be programming questions. Ideally good ones. Also helps a lot if you answer them.

If you want to go further than that, there are various levels of sponsorship possible for a tag, and [internet-explorer] has been sponsored at some level for at least a year. These grant you various advertising and branding privileges, but do not otherwise affect how questions are asked/answered within that tag.

Disclaimer: I work for Stack Exchange but am not involved in the sales or marketing side of things.

It's not as though SO hasn't been the de-facto support site for C# for years; what's one more platform? If Microsoft wants to go where folks are already asking questions on its products and answer them then more power to 'em.

We do have fairly strict guidelines for companies that want to do this however: http://stackoverflow.com/help/product-support

Google moved their support to SO for one of their products.

I wasn't happy with the lack of response from their support team so I posted a message saying "What the heck do I have to do to get an answer from you guys on your product?". What do you think the response from SO was? People yelled "it's volunteers here choosing to answer questions on their own time! You aren't allowed to demand a response on SO, who do yo think you are?". Or something to that effect anyway.

Corporate support channels do not belong on a site that is rigorously and outspokenly community driven.

If such a thing is to be allowed then there must be formal escalation procedures to be able to push questions up the line the the company that has offloaded its support to SO.

The whole thing just doesn't fit.

Google does not do support. This has been known for a long time. They don't hire support people, just developers.

As such, SO is the best support you're ever going to get for Google products.

(Thanks for the down votes - am I wrong? I doubt it ;) )

Google was very attentive when I wanted to buy something from them. Phone number, quickly answered by a helpful human.

The precise inverse of my experience trying to get support from them.

Its almost 2015 by the way. Alot has changed since google was completely awful at support.

They're just formally recognizing the state of affairs as it already is. When I have a problem with IE, I don't go to whatever MS had before (I don't even know what it was), I'd Google it and the first would invariably be StackOverflow.

MS has realized that they can save money and provide effectively the same support (since nobody used their support anyway) by recognizing the third party tool.

Correct. Microsoft did this for Azure support. I had a question, they redirect you to post on SO. And then the question is closed because it's off topic.

Now moving to a dedicated Stack Exchange site would be fine (like AskUbuntu). The software is OK, it's just the idiotic mods and hostile users that make SO suck.

I asked a question on Server Fault, and 5 years later someone added a helpful, perfect answer (a new library was available that did exactly what I needed). That answer was down voted, and then the user was chastised by someone, telling them off for answering an old question. Bizarre.

Strange, I answer old questions all the time.

> telling them off for answering an old question

I find this hard to believe. Link?

I'm guessing it was this: http://serverfault.com/questions/23058/linux-equivalent-of-w...

There are a lot of people on Stack Exchange. There's a surprisingly strict adherence to the rules, but it doesn't mean everyone thinks and acts to the same way. Nothing should come as a surprise!

Strange. There's even a badge (the "Necromancer" badge) for answering an old question: "Answered a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more".

I don't think all the badges are for good things. I recently got a 'peer pressure' badge for "Deleted own post with score of -3 or lower."

Your post is a "recommend me something to do this" rather than a "I have this specific issue".

One of the problems with these types of questions is that they attract "lists of things" answers which are mostly only backed up by links to external sites. Eventually these links rot away and the answers never get any proper love to keep things fresh.

Early on SO/SF/SU tried to combat this:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-sho...

The chastisement was probably unfair because John Ranger did attempt to summarise the linked landing page content, however the question probably should have been closed according to [0] to deter more link-only answers:

[0[: http://serverfault.com/help/on-topic

and it is not about…

Product, service, or learning material recommendations

YMMV whether you think this is fair nor not, but it's the site/network rules.

I created www.NotConstructive.com a few days ago in response to some of the challenges of posting to Stack Overflow.

Launch announcement: http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/notconstructiv...

Great idea, I really hope you are able to get the word out and build a community there. We need a place to talk about engineering, the part that comes down to trade offs, not just easy answers. I think that would be very constructive.

A mechanism to move / capture a SE question before it gets deleted would be nice.

Was this some kind of relaunch then? What happened?

HN post from over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876

Yep, read the blog post link in the parent message.

I guess you have to go where the people are, but man, I wouldn't want to outsource the knowledge base/forums for a major product to a different company. Seems like a valuable asset to give up.

I'm sure they'll be using the SO API every night and building an internal database, just in case.

All the data is creative commons and Stack Overflow makes complete data dumps available: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

So the trade off (going where the users are vs. the assets) doesn't seem that bad.

Its only 25GB!? I could have this all in Elasticsearch locally!

25GB of (I'm guessing) LZMA compressed text. That'll expand to a bit bigger than 25GB.

For now.... Just wait until you uncompress it!

Deduplication. They zeroed out all the "your question is not relevant because we say so" answers.

If you still have a link to a deleted question/answer, archive.org is your friend.

It's a shame that the SO community is constantly killing interesting and useful questions, just because "they don't match their format".

Interesting, thanks. I was really just making a joke: the questions I google up are somehow quite often flagged for one reason or another, which makes SO's uncanny SEO effectiveness kind of irritating.

I agree that is baffling the way interesting questions are always getting quashed.

I know that this was a joke, but in all seriousness, you should better bookmark any question you find useful/interesting.

Sure, but it's all anonymized, and not current (at least 8 weeks old). Is customer service a core functionality? Maybe not for some of the software for which support is being moved to SO. SO is a for profit company which took venture capital, so it's not like this is an open source project that MS can influence or co-opt if they need to.

Note that I've never been in charge of a large product like this, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

It is completely unlikely MS couldn't purchase SO? I can't imagine their valuation is entirely out of Microsoft's acquisition budget.

Well, then everyone else who has gone with SO as a forum solution is SOL. Err, so to speak.

It'll be a nice change from condescending Microsoft employees insisting the problem is on your end. Generalizing of course, but that's pretty much been my experience with the official forums.

Asking any big company for support is pretty much guaranteed to be as pleasurable as sticking sharpened pencils in your eyes.

Answering support messages can be a very time-consuming activity, so I would guess the advantages of essentially "outsourcing" their support (where help came come from both their employees and outside developers) is higher than any disadvantages of owning the knowledge base of this material.

What I find funny is, people mostly turn to Stack Overflow to find workarounds or answers "in the context of x and y". It is a very organic way to do support.

And IE, up to IE8, used to require a lot of workarounds, so pretty much the whole community has already turned to SO for debugging.

This is great news, and this new Microsoft that seems to be emerging (albeit late to the party) is a welcome change of direction.

But lets not kid ourselves. It's still Microsoft. In my eyes, they have one of the worst track records and it will take a monumental change for my perspective to change to positive; I do not know what it would truly take to change it.

They have played the evil corporation card for so long, I worry if you give them an inch they'll take a mile. But I welcome hearing good news from redmond, and hope it keeps coming.

The day I can run Visual Studio on Linux to develop a C# app / website I can deploy, run, and test in Linux is the day I forgive Microsoft for their recent issues. They definitely seem committed to turning over a new lease.

I was thinking something similar. If they were to materially invest in Linux (specifically help in it's sore spots) I would be able to forgive them. If they were just a positive force in software as a whole and made everything they touched better, and contributed their efforts to all sorts of existing community efforts (like linux; but other projects like browsers, databases, etc), they would win over the masses overnight. No question.

Microsoft, as a company that makes great software, is what I've always wanted them to be. But they've been so caught up on their own platforms and solutions that have run counter to that.

In a version of the future, it could happen. There could be a day where I, as a RoR developer, consider using MSSQL as my database, because it manages to be better than postgres or mysql, and has approachable OS/support licensing. Where I write code in their frameworks because they're better than Xcode and output code that runs on all platforms. Where I use IE because it renders the best and fastest and has the best inspector (and obviously, zero IE specific code required; and starts running on linux and OSX).

So it could happen. It's a sharp, sharp pull up from their current path, but there is a path to me advocating for them and what they build.

Given the nature and content of the specific forum, and that SO is built on a largely microsoft tech stack, moving it to SO makes sense.

Still an interesting move from Microsoft. Projects hosted on github, open source, versions of the .NET runtime for mac and linux, embracing docker, node.js and avoiding getting in fights over front end frameworks... this really seems like they're trying to turn a new page.

This might just be another embrace phase. They have been cyclical in the past. If they were to get a large portion of market share on their proprietary tech platforms they would certainly move to lock in their users and cripple the open platforms they are now adopting. They are only restarting the cycle because they are losing ground.

And I'm not coming at this from a malicious Microsoft angle, they are just in the same league as Adobe and Oracle in that they maximize revenue by dominating markets and crushing competition to force users onto their proprietary platforms. It is inherent to how their principle earning divisions operate.

This makes no sense to me. There is no opportunity for "extend" or "extinguish" for either StackOverflow or GitHub. Similarly, if they ended up destroying the various non-microsoft .NET implementations (mono..), it would affect the platforms they run on very minimally. There'd be a couple of pissed off people, but meh.

Exactly, I don't see them open sourcing Office or Windows any time soon.

After trying to outcompete Apple with similarly closed but way crappier controlled and closed environments (Windows 8 store and metro UI), they finally understood they had to push their own strength, that is: "developers developers developers developers".

https://developer.linkedin.com/blog/stacking-api-support-lin...

LinkedIn API support moved to Stack Overflow too. Same timing might not be coincidence.

With more and more teams moving their support to Stack Overflow, they should think about a way to show if the user is an official support person in their signature, rather than them writting "disclaimer I work at this" every time.

Wow this is very surprising, glad to see Microsoft moving more into the commoners domain. Not a big SO user, but what would prevent them from getting IE.stackoverflow.com?

Because web development questions that have to do with IE are not off-topic on SO. Why would they need an own site? There is no csharp.SE, java.SE, android-dev.SE, etc. either.

Does this mean Microsoft is terminating developer support for IE? All Stack Overflow can do is answer questions. They can't fix bugs in the product.

No, they are likely going to use it as a source for bugs to fix in IE.

That's useless.

Don't bother to report a bug to anything that doesn't offer tracking. It's pointless.

I don't think this is replacing Microsoft Connect.

https://connect.microsoft.com/

Hopefully they'll do better than Facebook!

That blog post does not look very "official". I had to double check to make sure it wasn't a joke.

That is one smart move by Microsoft. Microsoft definitely seems like it is heading in the right direction. I'm quite excited to see what Microsoft have under their sleeves. Faster release cycles for Internet Explorer (like any other popular browsers) would be a killer move by them, IMO.

I don't see what's so amazing about this move. SO is well established at this point and Microsoft are just moving a small subset of their vast technical support effort to another platform.

It is an excellent publicity stunt, though. It'll certainly fuel more of the "Microsoft has turned over a new leaf" discussion, but in the grand scheme of things with all their previous announcements like open-sourcing the C# compiler and .NET platform, this is a pretty negligible move.

It may be negligible, but for me it's evidence of a humility that I haven't seen before. "Old Microsoft" would never have publicly admitted that MSDN was inferior to SO, and if they admitted it privately their response would have been to build a replacement. Hell, Ballmer would have been throwing tables at anyone who suggested this during his tenure.

Looks like it's more of cost saving than humility, at least to me

One step at a time. Same thing I tell people about legalizing marijuana. You will never get everything you want, all at once. But if you go little by little...

Wow - is this a massive pivot for Stack Overflow? A new revenue model?

No, Google and other vendors have done this with a number of things (shifting support channels to SO) over the last few years. Its not a shift for SO. It might be a shift for Microsoft, though.

Does SO get paid for it?

This is... not what Stack Overflow is for...

Are you an owner or shareholder of SO? There's no way this was done without their consent, so unless you actually have a say in what SO is or isn't for, well...

Asked my first IE question there - got downvotes with "it's not an IE support page" comment

do you have a link to your question?

I would guess it's this one: https://i.stack.imgur.com/NFYi1.jpg

Yes this was that one.

Being honest this may not be following guidelines - so I deleted question. Maybe someone should create Stackoverflow like site for more open questions.

It's a very poor question, indeed. And downvotes and the close doesn't surprise me. Hobo Sapiens' last comment actually details that quite well. I also wouldn't expect the dev team to comment on that at all. When they are able to share whether something is being done, then the status on the page will change, but before that they'll make no comments or commitment on anything.

Agreed on question part.

Regarding IE itself: strongly disagree - marking most of new tech as "under consideration" is poor communication management at best - if they are not interested in sharing anything they should add another status. This is misleading.

We can have only so many statuses because it becomes difficult for even us to communicate in a meaningful way. "Under Consideration" means we're giving thought as to whether or not we will implement the feature, and when.

As for Web Components, we're actively discussing the related specs with other browser vendors, and trying to approach the topic as appropriately as is possible.

We certainly desire to be open and up-front; if you can identify ways in which we can improve our side of the discussion, we would love to know.

I think IE status page lacks some kind of info (in status item details) You could make it more clear for devs whether some tech has your real attention or your message is "this is ok but don't invest you time in it - we will not implement this in next 30 yrs"

www.notconstructive.com was launched a few days ago for this exact purpose - to answer more open questions.

I don't understand why Microsoft continues to make it's own rendering engine.

I get that they need a web browser they can control and distribute with their OS, but why a rendering engine? Especially one that, in my region (SF bay area), runs natively on fewer than 1% of the dev machines I see out there. If somebody were inclined to test their site for IE they'd most likely have to go through the hassle of setting up a VM running Windows just to do it. More and more, I'm hearing people just say "I don't test my work in IE" and being fine with it.

Is there a good argument for developing their own rendering engine, given the existence of two really good open source engines?

I'd be careful and try to recognise that the concentration of Apple-focussed development environments that you observe in the SF Bay area is not a reasonable reflection of the developer community at large. Windows still holds the greater proportion of market share by a large margin. On that note, you should make a point of also asking why Apple needs its own browser, or why Google needed to diverge Chrome from Webkit, or why Opera needs to exist, and so forth. Competition is good and mitigates complacency.

I'm glad they do. IE9 spurred a lot of competition around GPU accelerated 2D rendering and we all benefited.

Even now, IE11 and 12 are dramatically faster than Chrome on my laptop in terms of how quickly pages load, scroll, etc. Even though I don't use IE as my default browser, I think I probably continue to benefit from their performance work.

Regardless, Trident isn't going anywhere since Windows Store apps built with HTML/CSS/JS rely on IE's rendering engine to run.

They've also pushed the market into caring more about effects on battery life.

The browser, in particular the render engine, will be more than only a simple browser. MS focus on Webdevelopment and they will transform all their products to web and later the OS too (Windows Phone demonstrates this).

Other way round: they've already got a rendering engine, and a team maintaining it who are keen to keep their jobs. They may be concerned about the LGPL-ness of webkit.

The Bay Area is not the world. Plenty of corporates - MS core market - run IE.

Also, by bringing in a rendering engine, IE will never be better than the competition.

"With over 40-thousand questions tagged "Internet Explorer", and dozens more asked every day, it has proven to be a great place to find reliable help."

The announcement makes it seem that they are proud of how many questions are out there about IE issues.

Questions are the product of an engaged user base.

Excessive questions are the product of a UX nightmare.

More like engaged developers and large user base.

As of just now:

* tag [internet-explorer]: 27,934 questions

* tag [google-chrome]: 28,153 questions

Since the number of questions is your metric for attributing shame, that surely imply that chrome is much worse than IE, especially considering the long legaccy and larger install base of IE vs Chrome...

Or, I don't know, could it be possible that the number of questions reflects more than just how bad a piece of software is?

Chrome has by far the larger install base. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Now it does, but there was a time, at least when SO came online, when IE had a much larger install base, and older, troublesome versions of IE were still fairly popular.

for a little over 2 years, chrome has been more popular than IE

SO is 6 years old

That's wrong. Statcounter measures usage , while Net Applications measures user share and IE has by far the larger install base.

[internet-explorer] [internet-explorer-{version}]

[google-chrome] [google-chrome-{version}] [google-chrome-extensions] (4,194 questions) [Chromium] (893 questions) + Chrome on Linux, Mac and Windows.

Chrome also contains extensions, that would explain why there are a lot of more questions about "Chrome" + i think more tech-savaged people prefer Chrome to IE (because of dev tools), so SO wouldn't be a good reference for an objective market share view.

A 0.8% difference in a measurement this vague is enough to claim something is "much worse" than something else?

Looks like some people took my comment very personal. Notice that not anywhere I mentioned other browsers, and whether having a lot of issues is a good or bad thing. It's just weird the way they made the announcement.

I actually am proud :) It's awesome that people are asking their questions, and even more awesome that people are getting really solid answers. The significance of the 40k-question reference is that no matter what you run into, it's likely the answer already exists on Stack Overflow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com