Timeline for Is this site becoming what it's aspiring to be?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 21, 2014 at 9:23 | comment | added | Paul Gear | Excellent point, @jmp242. The one-off question is just part of building knowledge, and we need to find a way to make it possible to ask and tell things that aren't just simple Q&A without sacrificing the concise ServerFault format. | |
| Feb 20, 2014 at 15:41 | comment | added | jmp242 | My issue in saying forums are worse is that if you know enough to work as self creating FAQ when writing the question, you don't need to ask the question - google should suffice. The Microsoft Technet is a nice blend of forum and once marked as an answer it turns into a Q&A sort of format. | |
| Feb 20, 2014 at 8:20 | comment | added | user9517 | AIUI the Q&A format is deliberate and designed to avoid many of the problems that forums have. If you need a long comment thread diagnosing an issue (especially with the less able 'sysadmins' we see) then perhaps what you really need is $consultancy not Q&A. | |
| Feb 19, 2014 at 21:07 | comment | added | HopelessN00b | Well, we have a chat room... which is pretty similar to IRC, though I do prefer IRC. And while I agree that forums do build community a better, they're worse for getting actual help solving whatever problem it is you're having. Low signal-to-noise ratio and all that, so... as I said, I don't see a better way of doing it, and haven't found anything better, leading me to believe this might be as good as it gets. | |
| Feb 19, 2014 at 20:59 | comment | added | jmp242 | The forum format (I think) builds community better, i.e. you can have little side discussions etc. IRC under the same banner can be better as you can easily have some OT chat / community building. Q&A is... just that. So I don't see you getting a community where people want to hang out out of it really. | |
| Feb 19, 2014 at 20:47 | comment | added | HopelessN00b | I concur that the Q&A format is restrictive and may even be detrimental to professional sysadmin questions (troubleshooting via Q&A sucks), but the problem is I don't think there's anything better. The forum format certainly doesn't do any better, and you're just not going to get a community built around free, live support. The problem, of course, is that I don't know of anything better, or even how it could be done better... so ServerFault's as good as it gets, as least as far as I've been able to find. | |
| Feb 19, 2014 at 18:15 | history | answered | jmp242 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |