Problems i have encountered/seen in the last week

I am a new user to Codidact that just migrated from StackOverflow and there are some things I would like to get across.

Welcome to Codidact! Thank you for sharing your suggestions for improvement. One of the differences with Codidact is that the code is open source, so anyone who wants to can contribute to improving it. This can be by writing code, raising new feature requests, finding bugs, or suggesting improvements to documentation.

There is a lot of work still to be done, but it is encouraging to see regular improvements that do not need to wait for employee availability. You can keep track of these at Recent feature changes to the Codidact software.

Downvotes

The question is a self labelled rant, and that can lead to downvotes, but please don't let that put you off giving feedback. Each potential improvement / feature / bug that you spot is useful to hear about. If you raise each one in a separate Meta question then each can receive up and downvotes accordingly, rather than good ideas being lost under the downvotes on unrelated parts of the question.

Some of the points you raise have been discussed in other Meta questions, so I'll link to them during this answer.

There has also been previous discussion of What should I know when coming here from Stack Exchange?

Codidact has been divided into 2 categories (PowerUser/SoftwareDevelopment) which to me makes no sense

Codidact currently has 18 communities, plus a Proposals section for communities that are not ready yet.

You are not the only person to be concerned about splitting communities. There has been discussion of How granular should network communities be? There has also been a specific discussion about Is it possible to merge Power Users and Linux Systems? For Power Users and Software Development there is less likely to be a merge as Power Users is for software and hardware usage, while Software Development is for programming.

Everything looks desolate, the first question I clicked on was 8 years old and had 1 answer, ... import some questions/answers from StackExchange

Some Codidact communities have tried this, and others have chosen not to. Of those that have tried this, at least one has chosen to later remove them. This still leaves open the possibility of importing or re-asking a small number of carefully chosen questions, but some of the disadvantages remain, so I'd recommend reading the previous discussions before deciding to what extent to do this:

• What is the policy on importing questions by simply quoting the question over here?
• What kinds of data import can QPixel support?
• Proposal: tool for user-requested import of a single question and its answers from SE
• We should delete all old imported content

I saw a question on cabbages needing oxygen to live.

Don't get me wrong but this ... we learn at 4th grade

The question Do plants need ambient oxygen? may seem simple to you, but different people learn different topics at different rates. We don't have a rule against simple questions. It's also worth bearing in mind that the question is from Scientific Speculation, which is a community with roots in Worldbuilding Stack Exchange. This means some of the questions may be from people working on a novel, a screen play, a board game, or a computer game, whose specialisation is not in a scientific field. Their fictional worlds will benefit from being able to ask the basic scientific questions.

There's no in between either it's 5th grade basic questions, or rocket science that only a small group of people can interact with.

I agree that we would benefit from a broader range of questions for many of the Codidact communities. I don't know the best way to achieve this. Each of the communities has a Meta post seeking suggestions on how to grow. For example, the post on Scientific Speculation is How can we grow this community?

SE never had some place suited for discussion

There may be a Codidact chat function at some point but likely not in the near future. There has been some discussion of this:

• Would like written chat
• Would be nice to have a link to chat on the main sites

As mentioned there, we have a link to Discord in the right hand panel in the meantime, labelled "You can also join us in chat!".

Lastly, separate yourselves from SE, ... people who moderate there can't moderate here for the sole difference of objective and rules, it's only a matter of time until someone mixes them up.

There has also been discussion of this, in How can Codidact be independent from Stack Exchange, when you have same moderators?

posted over 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

1y ago

trichoplax‭

225 75 718 300

Codidact has been divided into 2 categories (PowerUsers/SoftwareDevelopment)

No, it hasn't. It is a network of 17 communities plus the global Meta site - just like how Stack Exchange is a network of (assuming I got my dev console magic right) 181 communities plus its global Meta. The scope of the Software Development site is in fact broader than on Stack Overflow; in particular, we accept questions about design and architecture that the Stack Exchange network would want to move aside to other sites programmers.stackexchange.com, langdev.stackexchange.com etc. instead.

But we do have a separate Power Users site because questions about how to use your computer more effectively are fundamentally not the same kind of thing as questions about how to write code. It requires a fundamentally different kind of expertise.

Everything looks desolate. The first question I clicked on was 8 years old and had 1 answer... for the love of god import some questions/answers from StackExchange

First off: we tried that already, in a few other communities (Writing, Outdoors and Scientific Speculation). It turned out not to work very well for community building.

Second: Codidact has only existed since 2019. The question you clicked on was an imported question.

Third: Saying "the site sucks because nobody is using it" is not helpful. Of course we would love to grow our communities, which is why there is a copied-and-pasted "How can we grow this community?" question on each per-site meta e.g. on Software. If you have constructive ideas, please feel free to contribute there (after reading what everyone else has already proposed). But "fake it until you make it" is not viable.

I saw a question on cabbages needing oxygen to live.

Was it perhaps this one, in the Scientific Speculation community, where it is perfectly on topic? If you don't like questions about biology then you don't have to use the community that is about science. If you think the question is too easy then that is simply not relevant, at least as long as the corresponding community doesn't think it's relevant. Q&A sites are more useful when they can answer easy questions as well as hard ones. There are a lot more people out there asking easy questions than hard ones, after all.

On the same point I also saw some questions that you would have to be an expert on the matter to answer. There's no in between either it's 5th grade basic questions, or rocket science that only a small group of people can interact with.

I disagree; I think the questions seen across Codidact cover a wide spectrum of difficulty levels. But if you think on-topic questions at a particular level are missing, and you don't feel like answering anything because of that, and you want to help make one or more of our sites better...

then why not...

ask some of those questions?

posted over 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Karl Knechtel‭

23 36 149 28

Just like on SE, things are vastly different between individual sites. You say you came from StackOverflow. Our most similar site is Software Development. It does seem to have reasonable activity, and there aren't any 8 year old questions there. That's because we deliberately didn't import existing questions from elsewhere. I also looked high, low, and sideways, and didn't see any mention of cabbages.

Early on, a few sites were initialized by copying content from elsewhere. That turned out to be a mistake. Just as you say, it's annoying to go into a question only to find it was asked 8 years ago, and not even here. Search engines also penalize sites for duplicate content. Some of that may be spilling over to other Codidact sites that didn't import any content. The few sites that did import content are consistently near the bottom in activity.

So no, we shouldn't import more content. We should be getting rid of what is here. While I think that importing is now widely seen as a mistake, only a little has been done about it.

You also need to do your part. That starts with actually understanding the organizational structure, both where you came from and here at Codidact. You seem to have confusion between Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, and with that same confusion now here.

If you want to be taken seriously, it also helps to write clearly. That starts with thinking about what you want to say clearly first. Non-sentences, not capitalizing the word "I", and generally flaunting very basic rules of English writing don't help. We realize English may not be everyone's first language here, but I'm talking about the very basic rules that anyone that can write any English at all would have to know.

posted over 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Olin Lathrop‭

46 122 342 122