FIRST StackExchange Proposal

FIRST General Forum
1

Hey Chief Delphi!

I’ve been a long reader of this site and I’d like to resurrect something that I posted a while back: A FIRST-based StackExchange Q&A proposal!

At the point of posting, we have 114 followers and we only need a few more people to make this a viable option. Especially during build season which is coming up starting tomorrow, this would be a fantastic addition (read: not replacement, but supplemental to Chief Delphi) to the FIRST ecosystem. This could be used for some of the same content on Chief Delphi, like programming, tech, and game rules questions, but would be in a different format from here: straight up question and answer vs discussion.

The reason that I am supporting this proposal is because there are a lot of questions that are poorly served on CD, especially those electronics and programming questions whose answers are buried on page 4 or 8 of the thread. On Stack, those answers would “bubble” to the top with the amount of upvotes that they receive.

You know those little tech questions that get posted and either never go answered or start a huge off-topic flame war? A FIRST SE would give especially these questions their own space that is more easily moderated.

A last reason is that SE is super easily searchable. Relevant questions and answers often make it to the top of google searches and are easily searchable for the programming-savvy through a dedicated search API that Stack offers.

Anyway, I’ve talked enough that you all can have your own opinions now. Here’s a link: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/87670/first-robotics

Hype for build season! ::safety::

2

I’d rather see people make the effort to put Programming Questions and Electrical Questions put into the right sub-forums.

Stackoverflow has a habit of tossing old threads so things get lost to history.

Google does a good job of searching CD, so you should be able to find things that way. I’ve never been disappointed (but, often surprised when I search for something non robot and it gives me a CD thread).

3

I often opt to use the following on Google instead of CD’s search function:

site:chiefdelphi.com [search text]
4

I haven’t experienced StackOverflow deleting old content. If anything, I have experienced the opposite- I frequently find very old questions that solve my problem on StackOverflow, whereas on CD they go into archive hell.

Here are some things that I love about StackOverflow that I think would be beneficial to our community:

  • Much better code formatting
  • A much more transparent close/delete/lock process (not that I’ve had any particular problems here)
  • Communal responsibility for an ability to improve quality of both questions and answers (we can make bad questions good and update old answers from users long gone)
  • Much more flexible content organization. Tags allow you to put content in multiple categories, whereas CD only provides large and general buckets.