Devs Unite! Support the Salesforce Stack Exchange Proposal

By Dana Le | Published: July 11, 2012

Stack Overflow is a developer-centric Q&A board that has great features such as syntax highlighting, advanced tagging, user profiles and community voting. Their board format is extremely easy to use and navigate, and the Salesforce technology community has been growing over there.

There has been a proposal to create a Salesforce-specific Q&A board, called a Stack Exchange that covers the gamut of Force.com platform development and issues all the way up to declarative development; beginner to through expert level questions are all welcome. This new Stack Exchange is entirely community supported, and will be a welcome complement to our current discussion forum and other Developer Force technical resources.

Rock star Matt Lacey has been spearheading the effort and this is what he had to say about this exciting development:

“It’s great to see Salesforce supporting a Stack Exchange Q&A Site, it will become in an invaluable community resource with all types of users, developers and administrators in one place. Once the site is live I hope everybody will realise why I’ve been blathering on about it so consistently for the last six months or so, and discover for themselves the power of the Stack Exchange model. “

If you’re interested in finding out more about this proposal and/or supporting it, just go to the proposal page, find the “Commit to this proposal!” link at the bottom and join the community. Sign on and be sure to give your feedback to shape the community over there.

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  • http://twitter.com/Kwongerific Brian Kwong

    One of the resources I used when I first started was Stack Overflow. It was very google friendly with my searches. I would love a Salesforce specific area!

    Supported!

  • vimarsh karbhari

    Amazing idea! All in for it..

  • greg grinberg

    I was one of the first 20 or so people to commit to this so you don’t have to sell me on this but right now the proposal is log-jammed. Until we get at least 100 users from SO with 200 rep or more the proposal won’t go into the beta stage.

  • http://twitter.com/AlwaysThinkin Luke Cushanick

    I’ll be the contrarian: I’ve always tried to drive questions to the official discussion boards so that there is one core forum. Having questions come in to Developer Force, Stack Exchange, Answers and, god forbid, Linked In, splits the audience of capable responders and diminishes the likelihood of a solution being offered while the issue is still fresh. Salesforce has allowed the capabilities of the official board to fall behind, search and filtering and sorting are primitive, and as a result, people are migrating to other sources.

  • http://www.facebook.com/adam.purkiss1 Adam Purkiss

    To echo Greg’s point, we currently need 64 more users with a reputation of 200+ on any other StackExchange site to get this into beta. The StackExchange (the framework StackOverflow lives in) is a wonderfully designed, highly effective, reputation-based forum incubator and hosting service. Unlike most forums/boards, it incorporates gamification techniques to increase engagement and quality of content, and it’s highly effective at this. For example, try posting an Apex programming question on StackOverflow and see how long it takes to get a good answer. You might be surprised at the response time and quality of answers.

    I agree with Matt Lacey that the very nature of Force.com makes it a unique fit in that StackOverflow is primarily for developers, not administrators, and therefore isn’t always the right place for certain questions and/or the answers may skew away from clicks-not-code when other options are available. Now that we have salesforce.com behind it, let’s make it happen!!

  • http://twitter.com/LaceySnr Matt Lacey

    Hey Luke,

    I think the difference between this and the dev boards though is that when you search for a problem and it’s been asked before, you’ll find only one question asking it — and that one question will have a community accepted answer. I think there’ll be considerably less noise than on the developer boards as the community moderation model really does work wonders!

  • http://twitter.com/LaceySnr Matt Lacey

    Hey Greg, thanks for supporting the proposal — Stack Exchange have indicated that they may well fast track this proposal because of the fact that there is such a large community that could benefit from it being live… hopefully we’ll start seeing some movement soon, but even without we’re up to 36% on that front now and it’s steadily climbing all the time.

  • Matt Brown

    I initiated the same questions Luke over on the Google+ post that Matt posted https://plus.google.com/u/0/111827922894049648255/posts I would love to get a response from Dana Lee on this as well.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_VSM4CGV5NXH7YQQWLUVHJEESQE Dana

    D’oh. Had a huge reply all queued up and then my browser crashed.

    The short version: We did mull this over for a while before jumping in with our support.

    I hear you on the community fragmentation issue. It probably the primary reason we took so long to consider the proposal. Ultimately, we consider this Stack as a complementary offering to the resources we already offer, and there is already something of a demographic difference. We’ve been working to improve the Developer Force discussion forum experience, and will continue to do so, but meanwhile are interested in seeing other forums succeed as well.

    With the kind of community support we’ve been hearing about and seeing, we wanted to support what channel the community is interested in using. Having a dedicated Salesforce area would widen the scope and benefit the community there, and in the end, that is our goal.

    I hope this helps. Send me an email if you want to discuss further!