Re: Use of Stackoverflow for Question/Answer forum

[Federico Bruni]

Il 22/dic/2014 23:21 "Ted Lemon" <address@hidden> ha scritto:
>
> On Dec 22, 2014, at 4:26 PM, Garrett Fitzgerald <address@hidden> wrote:
> > It's actually been discussed on meta - consensus is that people should actually come over here for help. :-)
>
> Yeah, so, this is intensely frustrating for anybody who tries to google for help with lilypond, because there are several dozen archives of the lilypond mailing list, each slightly different, so that if you do virtually any google search for help with lilypond, it returns a page with about a dozen identical copies of the same wrong answer, a couple of random document pages for different versions of the document that don't tell you what you need to know, and nothing whatsoever useful.
>
> So essentially, when you give this as the answer to the question "why not use stack overflow," what you are really saying is "don't google for help with Lilypond.   Instead, just ask your question."
>
> That's sort of a reasonable thing to say: whenever I ask a question on the mailing list, some helpful person (or likely two) come back with an answer.   But this isn't an answer that scales: if lilypond were to get more popular, at some point this would no longer work, and it seems to me that the difficulty of getting answers out of google is an impediment to lilypond's popularity.
>
> It just astonishes me that when I google for something like "how to shrink a staff in lilypond" I can't find any useful answer (although I find dozens of copies of the same utterly absurd answer: just shrink the notes, but keep the staff the same size!), and I think part of that is the way lilypond questions are asked and answered.
>

I can understand your frustration.
I think that LilyPond team's choices are sometimes a bit "conservative".

Q&A websites are just way better than a traditional mailing list. Period.