Finding answers is broken. Re-answering is annoying. What can we do to not frustrate users?

[mationai]

There has been issues opened and closed regarding this issue:

#5873 - Closed reason: "issues such as this should be raised with a view to discuss a problem, not with a predetermined, preselected, unilaterally decided solution. It fosters a better discussion and therefore a better solution."

Disagree in reasoning, but since that is the reason to close the issue, I am opening one with a title that does not suggest a solution even though it does in the discussion.

Why I disagree with close reason:
Yes, your reasoning is sound in most cases, but I do not see an issue with it in this topic.

1. Discord is a chat app, not Q/A app and search is broken beyond believe. "word1 word2" search ignores the quotes and returns all searches; impossible to scroll through hundreds of results that does not provide context of the summary result.

2. Stack Overflow is not the solution (was a possible solution before Discussions was avail in github).
   Reasons:

• It requires user to go to an external site
• it is not for svelte only, so requires users to know the [svelte] tag or see irrelevant results
• Very poor UX in comparison to Discussions in github (just take a look at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/svelte vs. any Discussion page at github).
• users need to signup there to ask question. Not all developers are users there. Case in point, I've been a developer for over 20 years and still not a user there.
• you don't have control over questions being dropped

3. Discussions is Stack Overflow done right and targeted to your project only. It is part of the svelte product since it is in github, the home of the project. If anyone disagree with using Discussions, let them come up with alternatives. In the meantime, by closing the issue because it "suggests a solution" is just trying to not face the elephant in the room, which is we need a better Q/A then Stack Overflow and Discord. Not only that, suggestion a solution here makes more sense than asking for one since we can start pointing out reasons why "Discussion doesn't fit what you want to achieve" as stated in the other related issue Online Forum Please #5857 but never answered instead of bike shedding on coming up with other alternatives.

I am frustrated as a user since some questions I found in Issues is closed by redirecting to Discord and Stack Overflow but Discord and Stack Overflow search did not provide results. Your are driving users away by strong holding the belief that Stack Overflow works when it doesn't and not providing the reasons for the beliefs.

Maybe some of the Svelte contributors may be frustrated too, as the suggested alt title was "Re-answering is annoying".

There are many Discussions in github that seems to be working, like https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions pointed out in above issue, and 2 I recently find useful - https://github.com/supabase/supabase/discussions and https://github.com/tradingview/lightweight-charts/discussions .

So please can you state your reason for "Discussion doesn't fit what you want to achieve" and let the users either agree or disagree with reasons?

[antony]

First off, raising an issue where you're openly pretending to be agnostic about the technology choice, and then providing a heavily one-sided argument, extolling the virtues of discussions to a team of people who have already stated numerous times that they don't like it, whilst technically meeting the requirements of my previous closure reason, is a thinly veiled "use discussions!" issue, and shall be considered as such.

Furthermore, telling us to justify our reluctance to use github discussions so that they can be put to a public jury for judgement is also not a particularly constructive way of proceeding. We are again looking for a "problem requiring a solution", not a "solution requiring github issues" here.

Rich articulated the disdain for discussions well in our recent maintainers meeting. We have discussed discussions a lot, and no single maintainer thinks it's a good idea. Some maintainers think it's a terrible, broken idea. Whichever way you look at it, we don't want to maintain and moderate yet another forum, whether other library authors think it's great or not. For what it's worth, vercel used to use a tool, the name skips my mind, but it was categorically the worst tool I've ever seen or used in my life, and they eventually abandoned it due to user complaints. Just because other people do something, doesn't mean it is a good idea.

Discussions has been noted as a poor way to maintain a conversation thread, it's hard to search and hard to keep track of things there, and it has a disconnect from actual issues. Things get forgotten and lost, and answers become stale. I'm sure others can come up with better arguments against it, since I'm probably the one maintainer who is least resistant to discussions being used. Whether they will spend the time doing so in this github issue, on the other hand, is up to them.

Either way. We've no intention of using github discussions, so it would be in your best interests to come up with a truly agnostic issue to solve the problem you have, as I don't believe this one is going to have the desired outcome.

[dummdidumm]

Regarding your dislike of Stackoverflow: For me it's the other way round. I'm used to Stackoverflow, I clearly can differentiate between the question, answers and the accepted answer. It pops up early in search results from Google. Also, while you may have an account on GitHub but not on Stackoverflow, it is the opposite for many people.

One thing which makes me unconfortable using GitHub discussions is that it has somewhat of an official stance, and with it go responsibilities such as ensuring that there's no toxic behavior which - speaking only for myself here - I neither want nor have the time to do.

I'm also still not sure that something like this is absolutely needed. Take React or Angular for example, they both have no official support forum and people are fine using various other channels such as Stackoverflow or Reddit. React has a page about it which I like, which we maybe also could add to guide people where to look for support.

[stephane-vanraes]

I fully agree with @dummdidumm here that not having any 'dedicated' tools seems to work for React/Angular and think the Svelte community should go in the same direction. Perhaps it could be useful to have a "Where to get support" page on svelte.dev though, the section on StackOverflow could even list relevant tags (or link directly to the tag) to help users better find the answers needed.

That said, I am usually following on Discord from 7AM to around 10PM, and the 'recurring questions' have subsided a lot, it would be more interesting in looking why the once that come back do come back instead, and so far I've found 6 categories of questions:

1. I didn't not read the docs at all and don't seem willing to do so
2. I read the docs but am still confused
3. How do you handle this common situation ?
4. Anyone knows a ready-made-component that does X ?
5. How to setup Svelte with technology Y ?
6. Help, I don't understand why my code is buggy 😭

Users that fall in category 1 will not be helped by any alternative approach, they are like a pestilence you have to live with (I tend to filter them out)

For those in category 2, we should take note and see if adapting the docs/tutorial is required (note that this already happens, writing documentation is hard and the Svelte maintainers are unlike Svelte itself, not perfect)

Category 3 is a bit trickier, this falls in the field of 'recipes', 'cookbooks', etc... There is an independent site Svelte Society that tries to gather some of those, but this is community supported, not by the maintainers. This is also the group that will get help on StackOverflow often.

Category 4 is more or less the same as 3, with the extra note that I am not aware of any framework that actively promotes third party component (libraries) so why would Svelte ?.

For those in category 5, this is completely out of scope for Svelte itself, this becomes the grey area of blogs and youtube and others.

That leaves us those in category 6, where often the answer is fully suited for their particular use case, a category that is perfectly suited for Discord in my opinion. Fair enough, sometimes this is a recurring error, but often not a first glance, only after digging deeper into it you will see it is due to a misunderstanding of a core concept, but especially beginners will not have the knowledge to realize that, even if any other system is setup, they will just start a new discussion/question/issue because of this, negating any value you might win from said system.

Currently most recurring questions deal with SvelteKit, which is normal because it has not been released or documented yet. (I simply ignore those) and that falls in the category of questions that deserve no answer 😉

[mationai]

@antony Thank you for telling us that "no single maintainer thinks it's a good idea". If that's all maintainers think Discussions is bad based on experience, then that closes it as a replacement for Stack Overflow. I know the 2 referenced issues were closed, so maintainers may not be aware that there are are users still waiting for followups and reasoning. I think that if this information was updated there or somewhere more easily accessible, it would have help users (maybe just me) understand it better. Not too important, but I disagree on being "pretending to be agnostic about the technology choice" as I don't think I did any pretending at all. I only phrase the title due to the reason already given. If I came across as pretending, sorry, that was not my intent.

@dummdidumm Thank you for pointing out the moderation side, I had not thought about that. Yes, I also understand many may find the Stack Overflow UX to be better. I don't think however that there can be more developers with StackOverflow accounts than github accounts since most developers can't really develop nowadays without cloning and commiting to github. But let's not sidetrack into that. My main point is Discussions seems ideal since everything is here - repo, readme, issues, discussions. Yes, we will most likely see projects such as React not using Discussions because it is a new product that did not exist when they started. There is much less motivation for them to switch. Since Svelte is much younger, I believe there is less of "let's keep things the way it is" mentality.

Thank you both for the feedback. It help a lot knowing that no maintainers like Discussions, so we can put that to rest.

Edit: I just see @stephane-vanraes' post and not have the time to read it yet. I will do that and reply tomorrow.

[antony]

@fuzzthink "If I came across as pretending, sorry, that was not my intent."

Apologies, I probably worded that badly. I meant the issue was pretending, not you. Essentially an issue that claims to be an open discussion about solutions to a problem and is in fact a foregone conclusion with a proposed solution.

But yes, unless somebody has just not spoken up about it, there aren't any of us who like discussions. It's definitely in the interests of us and the community to have a better way to provide support, but discussions isn't it.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[benmccann]

Thanks for raising this. Different people have preferences for different tools, so this is probably an area we'll never be able to make everyone happy. We've decided on StackOverflow for this though