I know SO allows to share knowledge Q&amp;A style. Do you think it is a suitable place to write a tutorial? I tried searching for similar questions, but the answers were not conclusive. I am struggling with creating ASP.NET MVC 6 app with Angular2. There are blog posts about this, but they don't cover latest Angular2 RC release, which changed things a bit. I have it almost figured out, so I thought of sharing my knowledge. I do not own a blog and there is no point in starting one since I don't know when I'll have something else to share with the community. Do you think it would be ok to write an article explaining in details how to setup ASP .NET MVC 6 project with Angular2 RC on StackOverflow?
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After a brief discussion with @MonicaCellio (In the comment) - It has come to my attention that perhaps I chose the wrong words to describe my original idea (In the edit history). When I wrote "social features" I was actually suggesting an alternative way to for users to share their knowledge using a new type of post and articles and not just by questions and answers.   The basics of my idea was to allow users to write articles on topics relevant to the community on the SE websites just as any answer posted is expected  to be too. Allowing users to write their own content (I.E posts/articles/etc..) will be granted as a privilege for advanced users so that not anyone could write stupid things, users that will write content must be established and well-familiar with the rules of SE.   I know anyone can start a blog, but it's require frequent maintenance and content updates, while writing on SE ensure that it addressed to a large, well-established community, with a similar fields of interest.  Posts writing will follow the same guidelines as asking and answering questions does, but it will provide an alternative for users that are mostly answering specific questions, as a new method to contribute to the community.   By writing, one may also reveal more about their personality, wit, way of thinking, ETC. That's when the "social" takes place - You'll also have "authors" and not just "users" you can remember by their catchy name, but people that you can remember by the field of interest they are writing content about.   They key points will be:    Users will be able write rich content with advanced WYSIWYG HTML editor, content that doesn't require a question to answer, but that is still relevant to the SE website it is writing on. Users will be able to Upvote/Downvote other users posts. Posts will be listed on their author profile, so it will not just show the activity, but additional layer of user generated content. Popular posts with high reputation could be associated to tags making the information of tags richer with user generated content Users will be able to include links in answers not only to other questions, but also to posts. User will be able to comment on post to allow the author to correct and improve it. It will improve the interaction and offline discussions (Which are prohibited when it come to long discussions on questions and answers). I believe that users will be happy to share their own tutorials, tips and tricks - Because they are already doing so when answering questions, but before the can start, they'll have to earn enough reputation to ensure that only high profile users will be able to write high profile content, and not just any rubbish. It will provide another type of method for voting and getting earning reputation Users will be able to include content in their CVs on SO Jobs.  Opportunity to earn some new badges.   So it's a Mega feature request and it require some detailed design work, but I do think that it will invite a new type of activity for users on SO (and the rests of the sites of-course).
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I just saw a  from a user asking about a C# stack trace.  It was a valid programming question for someone with little experience, yet it was marked down twice.  I've always believed that there are no stupid questions. Am I wrong?
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I understand and agree that opinion based questions are a bad thing on Stack Overflow, but shouldn't we have a place to ask this kind of question? There are so many times where I look at different frameworks and have to make decisions that will affect the next 3 years of my life without actually having all the pros and cons of both sides.  So my question is: Is there a place to ask these questions?  And if the answer is no, could that be a new Stack Exchange sub-website?
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I like to create a friendly SEO web application, so I choosed Angular 6 framework Universal to render pages on server side, that's make my applications pages reachable to Google crawlers.  But even if for a small application the average page size is more than 3 MB due a bulk of code added.  So do you recommend me to use Angular framework?
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A while ago I created this Meta discussion based on a few people using &lt;kbd&gt; tags to link to their JSFiddle demos: , but this was changed to . This is a similar discussion but without any automatic formatting rules enforced.    Yesterday I flagged  as all of his posts with JSFiddle demos use &lt;kbd&gt; tags to link to them, and it would simply take too long to edit all of his posts:     This person keeps putting links to their demos in kbd tags. I've edited a few of them, but don't have the time to go through all of his answers. Can you notify him what kbd tags are supposed to be used for?   Example usage: Working Fiddle  This was declined with the reason:     Hmmm, I don't think this is really that big a deal. Perhaps you should ask a discussion question (Discussion!) on Meta as to whether there should be a policy about this.   Can something please be enforced about this? Using this markup to link to non-user input goes against the :     The kbd element represents user input (typically keyboard input, although it may also be used to represent other input, such as voice commands).     I've even found myself having to edit out misused &lt;kbd&gt; tags from  as well.
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"What library can I use to do X?" type of questions are not welcome on Stack Overflow, right?  Even if they are not welcome on SO proper, is there any other SE board where I could ask such questions?
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I was just trying to find out if there was a public API for the Stack Overflow site. I want to know so that I could maybe use it for whatever it would let me use it for (like web-service or non browser application that can access Stack Overflow). I have a few (specific) ideas but I don't want anybody to get the jump on me before I have a chance to implement one of them ;). I know that is a little silly since there are a limited number of things that such a thing could be used for. It's not about $$ or copyright* or anything like that; I just want to do it my way first if possible. Anyhow I tried googling this and you can imagine how many results you get for "StackOverflow public api".
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tl;dr  Due to the special nature of Meta and the high rate of "lost souls", should we try out the Ask a Question Wizard here on Meta Stack Exchange too?  General idea  In case anyone doesn't know yet, . It guides new users towards writing better questions.  I think that such a question wizard would be useful on Meta Stack Exchange too, for three main reasons:   . There are four types of questions on Meta, each represented by the different required tags: , ,  and . Especially bug reports can often be split into a certain structure (what's wrong, how to reproduce, why I think it's wrong, examples). The same holds true for feature requests. Such a structure is ideal for a question wizard. Quite a few users  and . While the Meta community is well prepared to deal with these posts quickly, they lead to an less-than-ideal first impression by the new users and they distract the community from more important issues. Site-specific questions are often off-topic. This  since nowhere is it hinted at in the help pages (and there are a lot of old, not-yet-closed SO-specific questions from a prior era of this site) and can lead to unnecessary drama. If we add an honeypot into the wizard to catch this case (and ideally redirect them to the proper meta site), we could prevent this.   As Sonic said, there's an  new users need to read and confirm. However this doesn't really prove effective right now and we might need to try stronger tools (e.g. question wizard).  Therefore I think that we should test the Ask Question Wizard here on Meta too.  Implementation details (help welcome)  I think the wizard should have six main entry points:   I want to discuss a specific post or action from any Stack Exchange site. (-> honeypot, redirects to the appropriate per-site meta) I have a question regarding the use of Stack Exchange sites (-> support mode) I think I found a bug while using the Stack Exchange sites  (-> bug mode) I have an idea for improving the Stack Exchange sites  (-> feature request mode) I have a discussion I want to start about Stack Exchange communities or their rules  (-> discussion mode) I have some other (e.g. programming) question  (-> honeypot, redirects to )   Coming from these choices, the user would either be redirected to a landing page explaining, why this is not the right community and offering some alternative choices or they would follow the guided assistant.  For 1. the user might be asked on which site the post/action is. Maybe the system could show the three sites where the user was recently active/has the highest reputation on.  support mode would ask the user for these details:   what do you want to achieve? what have you tried? what is your current problem?   bug mode would ask the user for these details:   bug description how to reproduce the problem why do you think that this is wrong? (possibly) examples   feature request mode would ask the user for these details:   what is your goal? how do you think could this be achieved? why will the community benefit from this change? (possibly) details   discussion mode would ask the user for these details:   which rule do you want to propose/clarify (optionally) examples/why is this rule required?   Note: the above implementation details probably require some revision. Feel free to edit/suggest improvements for both wording and details.
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Sometimes you spend a day or more solving a technical problem, and when you finally solve it, you may want to post it on your blog (if you have one) to share with the community.  However, most developers don't have a lot of time to update their blogs, and that is why personal blogs are not ranked very highly on Google/Bing.  So even if you describe a brilliant idea, chances are that, except a few of your friends, nobody will ever find it. This is a common reason why some developers start their blogs and soon give up; it is not interesting to write for the community if you have no feedback on your posts.  Unlike personal blogs, Stack Exchange sites are highly ranked in Google (I was amazed when I saw that a question asked on SO just an hour ago appeared 3rd in my Google search!), so if your question and answer are valuable for others, they will be rated highly and will be visible for other developers.  With this in mind, is it good practice to post a question and answer it yourself immediately when you want to share an idea with the community?
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I have a question about MediaWiki formatting. Since this is similar to LaTeX questions, I figured it would have a nice, happy home on Stack Overflow. I'm not quite sure if it's programmer related enough though.  What does the community think?
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Stuff like polls, recommendations based on subjective constraints, puzzles, webcomics etc. do not belong on the serious main SE sites, where professionals should be considered at work and having just a few spare minutes ("code's compiling") to answer questions, so they should not be distracted by such things. However, I'd also like to have a home for these things still using the SE engine. For the reason I mentioned before, this needs to be a separate place though. Let's call it four.[sitename-here].com.
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I'm just learning asp.net mvc and I'm trying to figure out how to move my controllers into a separate project.  Typically when I have designed asp.net web apps before, I created one project for my models, another for my logic, and then there was the web.    Now that I'm learning asp.net mvc I was hoping to follow a similar pattern and put the models and controllers each into their own separate projects, and just leave the views/scripts/css in the web.  The models part was easy, but what I don't understand is how to make my controllers in a separate project be "found".  Also, I would like to know if this is advisable.  Thanks!
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After rolling it out to the International Stack Overflow sites last week, we're rolling out the new ask page to the whole network today. The new page was designed with the goal of helping new askers by more readily presenting them with tips on how to improve their question. This is a combination of the &quot;Ask a question wizard&quot; (that was tested on Stack Overflow) and the current standard &quot;ask a question&quot; page. You can read more about it . The /questions/ask/advice page has been replaced by a new modal for first-time askers, and the flow is now broken down into two steps: drafting the question, and reviewing the question — so no more random warnings triggering when you switch from the tag to the title field, while others only show up if you actually try to post. And as the blog post notes, there's also an informational modal at the end, so new askers know what to expect once they've asked their question. Enough words, here's what it looks like... (click on the images to see the larger versions) Welcome modal for new askers:  Drafting a question:   Reviewing a question, with errors (shown inline) and warnings (shown on the right side):   Reviewing a question, without errors:  What's per-site customizable, and what's the procedure to get it live? As you can see, any existing custom guidance on &quot;How to ask,&quot; &quot;How to tag,&quot; or any custom error or warning messages your site may already have in place will still be there, and will still be customizable with the same restraints (basic HTML, using paragraphs, lists, links) as before:  The &quot;welcome modal&quot; for new askers (seen with the default text in screenshot 1), everything between the title and &quot;Before you post...&quot; (this is only custom on 4 sites at the moment, ). The full contents of the &quot;Draft your question&quot; sidebar (seen with the default text in screenshot 2, and with custom text in screenshot 3). The text in the tag popover, between &quot;Tags help the right people...&quot; and the bullet points (seen with custom text in screenshot 2, and with the default text on screenshot 3). The above three have no character limits, aside from &quot;within reason.&quot; The placeholder text in the title field (text only; seen with the default text in screenshot 2, and with custom text on screenshot 3). The warning text shown in the &quot;Review your question&quot; sidebar, regex-based (seen with the default text in screenshot 4, and with custom text on screenshot 5). Tag-related error messages and warnings, regex-based (seen with custom error text in screenshot 4, with the default text on screenshot 5,  and with a tag warning ). The warning and error messages described in the two bullet points above have a limit of 1000 characters.  These can only be edited by staff, so the process to get them live is as described :  Create a Meta post on the appropriate Meta site, and discuss it with your community. Once a consensus is reached, a mod should escalate it to the CM team. Generally speaking, the &quot;contact us&quot; form is the best way to go, though a ping in chat can sometimes work too (the most that could happen is we ask you to use the form). Unless there are any outstanding issues, the CMs should be able to get to it Soon™.   This has been live on Stack Overflow for a while now, and like I mentioned at the beginning of the post, we're rolling this out to the rest of the network now. If you have any questions or see anything that has broken on your site, please let us know — we'll be actively monitoring and responding to this post until March 10th. After that, if you have a bug or specific request, start a new post and tag it with  and  or  :)
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I am thinking of making a site which will have a forum. I already have a lot of users (in an old forum, which I want to renew).  I like the Stack Exchange concept (voting, reputation, etc).  Can I build one of my own on my site? (I don't intend to copy any source code, just the concept itself.)  Is the concept patented or otherwise legally protected, or is it free to use?
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I am just learning how to program, and I have been using Stack Exchange.  I think it is a fantastic idea for a website, and I think the moderations helps the community as a whole.  However, for someone new to programming like myself, it is hard to ask and answer questions in a constructive way.  I can only answer a small fraction of the questions, and by the time I've written out the code myself, someone has answered it before me, invariably because the problems are hard for me to solve as well.   This is where a Stack Exchange site geared towards beginners would be beneficial to us who are ignorant of asking dumb questions.    I think Meta stack exchange is geared towards conversation, so, what do you guys think?
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Today I had some time and felt like writing a relatively good answer on Stack Overflow; explaining both the underlying mechanisms and good practices, unlike usual declarative answers in a "do that" style.  It took me like an hour of time, $50 if I were free lance. It'll bring me nothing but 3-5 occasional views, and - if I get lucky - some ignorant comments.  You know, it's quite discouraging.  Instead of pride for the job that was done, I feel frustrated. I know, this answer may offer help to the OP, if he ever notices it (being already satisfied with other answers).  So the only fate the answer will meet is to sink forever, below thousands other questions, falling like snow.  So, being a programmer, I am thinking of efficiency. It's a waste of time to spend so much effort to answer one question when there is no way to [actually] reuse it. So, I wouldn't do it again but just turn back into short answers mode without explanations.       Seeing other answers, I don't think I am only one with such feeling.  The current policy is driving knowledgeable and educational users away, yet it attracts inexperienced ones in numbers. Ones who will tell you to use [some technology] which they never have laid their hands upon. Ones who write answers just because they have learned some "good practice" from other questions, and this "knowledge" becomes an endless source of rep points.  The idea of Stack Overflow is rotten. It was excellent when trees were high and traffic was low.  It turned bad now; it has become a honeypot for all the "enthusiast programmers" of the world, eager to share their 2 cents faster than you can say the word "close".  You're killing a great resource. Despite all the nice words and proper declarations, it discourages the reuse of the knowledge. And encourages fast on-site answers.  Of course, the rules will tell you contrary. It's all nice and proper (if you don't mind it's strict mutual exclusivity). But mechanically, technologically it works in the way I described.  I tried to write a tag wiki. You know, it was biggest waste of time in my life. As a matter of fact, it is not a wiki at all; you can't even link to a certain section. Not to mention that nobody ever has the idea to read tag wikis.  Reference questions? Don't make me laugh. There is no good mechanism to store and categorize links. Favorites, although intended for the different purpose, are a chunk of crap when you want to use it as a reference. So, you can't compete with 30-seconds answers: a question will get 5 answers before you can even find an appropriate link.  Okay, I can organize links myself but, there are some problems:   I am just a human. I cannot remember everything I am just a human and I cannot answer questions at rate of 1 qpm. One person cannot fight the Tide. It's helpless. When technology makes people writing fast [incomplete] answers -  no good will of proper declarations can do a thing.  Even if a question gets finally closed, it won't hurt anyone - the hydra grew two more already.   You'll call me a brute for insulting honest users and innocent volunteers, but that's fact: There are much more inexperienced users than experienced ones. And inexperienced users have much more spare time to hang over than experts who have their job to do. So, from that fact we can conclude that most of the answers on Stack Overflow have a low quality. Nobody cares. But I do.   There should be a technical way to limit the activity of not-so-knowledgeable-yet-eager-to-answer users. There should be a technical preference for the closing a question over answering it (have a silly answer for the silly question? welcome to comments). There should be a technical solution to accumulate and structure knowledge, a system that lets you choose a good answer instead of writing it by hand.   That's the only way. Otherwise Stack Overflow will remain an automated dispenser of bad practices.  Well, I just felt like letting it out again. Thank you for reading.
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Is it okay if I ask a question on Stack Overflow about the concern I have in my project? I am midway and unable to figure out how to move ahead.  I am not looking for someone to write and give code for me, but I am stuck at some point where I am unable to understand how to proceed, as it includes different programming languages/nosql database.  Or to put it in another way, where can I ask such question?