New official Magento Forums announced. What does that mean for Magento SE?

Question

Since its inception Magento SE has served as a less than ideal brace against the horroshow that was v1 of the Magento forums. Once those forums were shut down, Magento SE received a deluge of less-than-stellar content. Today the new version of the Magento forums went live, and I think there may be confusion about where to post which questions and in general what this means for Magento SE.

In short, I believe that Magento SE will remain healthy for the following reasons:

1. There's an active userbase which isn't going to suddenly disappear.
2. We (Magento) are encouraging folks to ask technical questions at Magento SE
3. There will still (and likely always will) be significant organic traffic bringing users to this forum

If anything, I expect the moderator workload to be reduced and the overall quality & stats to increase. That said I'm sure we'll see some crossover posts, and I'm fine with that as these may serve to bridge the two groups.

So why am I posting this here, now? Well, I want to get others' thoughts on my thoughts. I'd also like to encourage everyone to visit and participate in the new forums.

Answer 1

I think you're on point. Magento SE will be my first choice to ask questions.

I also feel that Magento SE is for technical questions for developers of all levels, whereas magento.com's forum can serve both technical and non-technical questions. Although, I think it's going to be more of the latter, allowing Magento SE to have get higher quality posts and returned uses (hopefully).

I'm optimistic that this forum's quality will go back up.

Answer 2

I'm really happy to see the new Magento forums are back to shine in new splendor. I think the official forums are an essential part for the Magento community, especially for non-technical people. MagentoSE - and also the forums - will hopefully benefit from that.

I hope the quality of questions here will increase again and I think MagentoSE will stay as a big player for technical Magento questions (with regard to the good rankings on Google and user count) even though we will see technical questions on both forums - which I think is totally fine.

The stackoverflow/stackexchange concept is well accepted within the developers which might also be a factor for future participation and MagentoSE to stay as an essential information resource.

Answer 3

What's with this spam? Trying to promote your forum through stackexchange? JK.

Congratulations on the new launch. Let's hope that this forum will last longer and will not face the same spam issues the previous one had.

From my point of view this website and the new magento forum should work together to make the community stronger and more educated.

I'm sure that Magento SE is here to stay. Beside the reasons you listed I might add that Magento SE is part of the SE network that is kind of a live/job saver for most of the developers.

I strongly suggest a separate section for third party extensions on the forum (maybe subsections based on what the third party extensions do). This way we can send users from SE to a specific area, where even extension providers might be able to provide support for their extensions.

Answer 4

Good to hear the new official forums have been launched.

I can certainly confirm this

Magento SE received a deluge of less-than-stellar content

While it wasn't always the case the questions on here unfortunately seem to have (in my opinion) very much degraded, with a massive portion of questions being requests for bug fixes i.e. I'm getting this error message, or this is broken etc etc. The vast majority of the time they are store specific, and often just cannot be answered without some in depth questioning and possible testing in a local development environment. These kinds of questions (again in my opinion) add very little value to SE as the likely hood of any solution which may be given being relevant to another user in the future is extremely low due to it being so store specific.

I haven't been active on SE for a huge amount of time, but even I can clearly see the shift away from the kind of 'how to' questions which give the opportunity for a truly useful to the masses, tutorial type answer. These kinds of questions now seem really very few and far between compared to the past.

I really enjoy sharing my Magento development knowledge from the past 5 years or so, but have in the last few months really been quite turned off SE purely because of how hard it has become to actually find good questions to answer which aren't so store specific as to require time I just don't have to get all the required information and run the required tests. Shouldn't these kinds of issues be resolved by the stores developer (yes I know there won't always been one, but there really, really should be), with the likes of SE being there to answer core related queries on functionality and customisation?

My hope is that with the launch of the new official forums there will again be an increase in the quality of questions asked and answered on SE, time will tell.