[ot] Re: D hidden features topic for StackOverflow

[Bill Baxter]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:00 AM, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:
> "BCS" <ao at pathlink.com> wrote in message
> news:78ccfa2d327f38caeb130eba3eae at news.digitalmars.com...
>> Reply to Nick,
>>
>>
>>> Meh, stack overflow needs to die a swift death. OpenID-only login,
>>> modal dhtml "dialog boxes" (WTF were people thinking when they first
>>> created these?!?!), and complety Ajax (I *HATE* Ajax).
>>>
>>
>> you don't even need to log in and it works without JavaScript at all. (or
>> it's suposed to do that, havent tried it my self)
>>
>
> Maybe it's just because it's beta, but when I was there, attempting to vote
> on anything resulted in a "you must log in to vote" message, and disabling
> javascript resulted in a "This site requires javascript" header strip.

I think you do need to log in to vote.  Otherwise the "reputation"
score would become pretty meaningless.  It would be too trivial to
just vote yourself up.

I agree that Ajax sucks, but in my opinion about the only thing worse
than a web app using Ajax is one *not* using Ajax, requiring 23 pages
of slow click-and-reload options just to do the simplest thing.

After having used StackOverflow for bit now, I think the biggest
problem standing in the way of it achieving its goal of being the
definitive place to find excellent answers to tech questions is the
lack of editability.  You can't edit other people's good answers to
make them great answers.  And I find I just can't bring myself to copy
someone's good answer and edit it myself to make it great.  I tried it
once and I still feel scummy for having "stolen" that guy's answer
like that.  Stealing answers and making them better is the way it's
supposed to work from what I understand, but I think most people are
too polite for that to feel like the proper thing to do.  Plus doing
that flagrantly violates the DRY principle which will make most
programmers cringe.

I think what they need to do is for each question add one definitive
"community answer" that works Wiki-style.  Anyone can edit that answer
and it should ideally reflect the union of the best individual answers
given by folks.

--bb