StackOverflow integration

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One positive aspect of using this forum over Slack is that it helps with answering code-related questions. Once the question is asked, it doesn’t disappear in Slack history, and can be searched for later on.

One potential negative aspect is that some of these questions might be a good fit for StackOverflow. If the community starts to use this forum to handle questions, they will not be asked on StackOverflow, which is much more visible to the broader developers community. As a side-effect, it might end up giving the impression that there are no F# questions on SO, which can be seen as a sign that there is no F# activity overall.

My question is the following:

  • Should we encourage people to ask questions on StackOverflow instead of here? When is a question a better fit for one vs. the other?
  • Can we have a hook that surfaces questions tagged F# either here or on Slack? Historically, getting quick answers to questions on SO hasn’t been an issue, but we could possibly make that even better by giving questions visibility either here or on Slack.
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My personal thoughts:

Should we encourage people to ask questions on StackOverflow instead of here? When is a question a better fit for one vs. the other?

I wouldn’t worry about this too much. Most of the other languages seem to get more regular users asking questions on their forum, which is a good thing, I think. Proper promotion of the forums will likely make this less of an issue over time, as discoverability via google will only improve over time.

Can we have a hook that surfaces questions tagged F# either here or on Slack?

I’ve been looking into this. I am fairly certain I can get them posted to Slack, which is probably more appropriate than posting here. I do not know if they could get posted here, but I think doing so would risk making us look like one of the sites that crawls SO and copies content…

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@mathias.brandewinder and @reedcopsey I’m not sure if you’ve seen this:

This q&a API is searchable and queryable via HTTP (if my thinking is correct about this product being similar to StackOverflow enterprise) and it would be cool to just script the FSSF site to populate the questions & answers as widgets here (like a feed or something where you could click to go to SO). You could also probably do some deeper integration (if motivated).

Gina

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Also, I’m sure there are Slack integrations for Stack Overflow’s offerings.

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@wiredsister SO for Teams is probably cost prohibitive. I do think I can use some of our existing tech stack to make a simple integration that posts to Slack when F# questions are asked on StackOverflow. Was going to work on it shortly.

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This is now active. New StackOverflow questions tagged F# should get posted to https://fsharp.slack.com/messages/CAS11UB2M/ automatically now.

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Absolutely agree with @reedcopsey
If I can be blunt, forget SO as much as possible.
Little example from today’s experience. Having a blocking issue with packet.exe. Googling and looking at SO: a hour lost with certificates, mmc, nuget settings in vs 2017. Not even tried to post there (I deleted my account cause they can be really rude)
Asked on your Slack channel. After one minute one: complete solution arrived and problem solved, boom. That’s just a little example of what kind of quality you should bring here in this forum (not on SO, once more, sorry)

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I do not want to get into political discussions but integration wise if you paste in questions and answers we onebox them:

EG:

And:

If you have and Discourse specific questions feel free to ping me :slight_smile:

Note we automatically highlight code and you can set it to do so more aggressively in site settings (so you give up PRE blocks and everything is treated as code.

open System

[<EntryPoint>]
let main argv =
    printfn "Hello World from F#!"
    0 // return an integer exit code
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