Our StackOverflow/StackExchange presence

Guido X Jansen

Hey everyone 👋 .

Based on the discussions we’re having at the hackathon this weekend in Vienna, we really need to get a better presence on StackOverflow/StackExchange.

Different options were discussed, and we decided to propose Spryker as a new topic on StackExchange.

We’ll have to go through different stages and get enough people to follow, ask questions and vote on the questions and this is where we need the help of the whole community!

Step 1⃣: Login to SE and follow this proposal here

Step 2⃣*: L*ook at the proposed questions and place your votes

Step 3⃣: Add your questions. These could be new, but also any previous questions you had here in Slack or any new questions you currently have. (Please not that for this first stage, answers won’t be answered in SE, that comes if we have enough followers/votes in the next stage).

We need at least 60 followers and 40 questions with a score of 10 or more so let’s make this happen together! 🤝🚀

Thomas Lehner

cc @U036RD4K5BJ home to our new KB?

Chemaclass

Great idea! I will try helping out as much as I can as well 🙂

Guido X Jansen

@U015S0C0V29 awesome, I knew I could count on you! 😄

U02P7B6K2LC

Hey I'll help as much as I can. We went through a the same process in the Joomla community a few years back. I'll ask my contacts to contribute as much as possible.

Guido X Jansen

Make sure to not just follow, but also add questions and vote on them. We need 40 questions with 10+ upvates :

Guido X Jansen

Halfway there in terms of followers! 🎉

Guido X Jansen

Meh 😕

U02P7B6K2LC

Wtf?

U02P7B6K2LC

Is there a a way to “appeal” or get a human in the loop?

Thomas Lehner

at least to tell what that duplicate page should be?

Guido X Jansen

@tom.lehner their reasoning is that there's no need for a separate site and that all can be covered on StackOverflow

Guido X Jansen

which is a weird reason to me. I mean: there is also a Magento substack, so why no Spryker Substack.

Guido X Jansen

Surely, if we can't get enough people to follow/vote then we don't deserve our own substack, those are the rules of (their) game.

Guido X Jansen

I have a chat with them scheduled on Wednesday to talk about https://stackoverflow.co/collectives/, but I will now also highlight this as well

Thomas Lehner

👍

Guido X Jansen

Afaik there's no way to DM users (JNat in this case) to ask for further explanation

Guido X Jansen

I also filled in their contact form to ask for explanation and how we can get this back on track

Guido X Jansen

according to https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/263679/timeline-of-a-stack-exchange-site we should have a full year to get enough votes/followers, so no idea why it was closed after just 2 weeks

U021QH3GDGV

"This subject is already well-covered by a live Stack Exchange site."

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/spryker

Since when 8 questions with 5 answers is well-covered ??

Guido X Jansen

@U021QH3GDGV that I also don't know.

Guido X Jansen

Hi Guido,

I’m Slate, a member of the Community Management team at Stack Exchange. I wanted to give you a bit of a detailed reply, and I apologize for the extended wait. First, thank you for emailing us - there’s a lot of advice we can offer to help make sure a future Spryker proposal succeeds. Second, I do want to be clear that a Spryker proposal is still on the table, but there are some key policy points that are important to consider.

We review all Area 51 proposals that gather a certain amount of attention. It’s a small check at the start, to make sure folks don’t put a huge amount of effort into a proposal that will later need to be turned down. The Spryker proposal was closed during this step.

During that review, we check to see whether there are a diversity of proposed questions that differ substantially from other sites on the network. In particular, for technologies that have to do with code and programming, we try quite hard to make sure that the site can cover a substantial number of questions that Stack Overflow would not already answer on its own. That’s because we do our best to both make sure communities are reasonably independent of each other, and that important knowledge is not splintered across multiple sites. In short, a proposed spryker.stackexchange.com should be the obvious place to go for many key Spryker questions - not Stack Overflow.

When we reviewed the Spryker proposal, what we found was that most questions proposed would, to our understanding, still be on topic for Stack Overflow. Questions about code, programming logic, IDE usage, etc. can make good questions on Stack Overflow and regularly receive answers there. You are right to observe that many of the questions on Magento and Salesforce could be asked on Stack Overflow as well. However, during their Area 51 processes, they demonstrated they had enough questions that could not otherwise be asked on Stack Overflow. Those questions warranted the genesis of a new site.

What I’d recommend for the future:
1. Consider carefully what value a Spryker proposal could add over, for example, actively attending to the [spryker] tag on Stack Overflow.
2. During the Definition phase, focus on upvoting questions that make clear a site dedicated to Spryker will be for more than just what Stack Overflow covers.
3. Encourage committers to propose example questions they might not get good answers to on Stack Overflow.

I would also like to note - what we look for in an Area 51 process have changed with time, particularly as we’ve learned lessons about what makes proposals work and how to set sites up for long-term success. While I do recommend looking through past examples of successful Area 51 site launches, I would also recommend taking them with a grain of salt. When in doubt, please ask questions. We’re happy to help.

Please let me know if you have any questions, and I’ll be happy to answer.
~ Slate, Stack Exchange Community Management

Unknown

SO doesnt seem to be used very actively, either: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/spryker

Guido X Jansen

@UQK3ZPJEN correct. Despite that, I keep hearing developers that would like to have more Spryker content on there. Bit of a chicken-egg situation we have there

Unknown

It would require professional and helpful help there I think to boost confidence.