[ot] Re: D hidden features topic for StackOverflow

[Bill Baxter]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:46 AM, Bill Baxter <wbaxter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Hmm... I just noticed that you can check the "Community owned" box
when you post an answer.  I guess that's the polite way to steal
people's answers without being annoying.  Maybe that solves my
concern.  I'll have to try that option out and see how it works in
practice.

Another problem is that often you end up wanting to have a discussion
with the people interested in the question that runs along side actual
answers.  The format is not conducive to that since every post has to
be an answer or a comment tucked away underneath someone else's
answer.  I think a "discussion" tab on each question page would help
keep the answers page cleaner, and help it feel more like a community.

Kinda like how every regular thread on news.digitalmars gets paired up
with an OT thread for random discussions.  :-)

--bb