Re: Firefox OS / apps questions on Stack Overflow

[Jeff Griffiths]

On 2012-10-26 9:19 AM, Kumar McMillan wrote:
> As mentioned in a previous webapps thread, questions are popping up
> on Stack Overflow about Firefox OS
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/firefox-os?sort=active&pagesize=15
>
> Not only are some unanswered but some of the answers are wrong. If
> you have knowledge of the system, you may want to subscribe to that
> tag to help out.
>

I handle this for Jetpack questions along with a few other community
members ( Wladimir Palant is very active ). I find personally that the
best way to track it is to subscribe to the rss feeds SO produces:

http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag?tagnames=firefox-addon-sdk&sort=newest

Some hints to handle this as a group:

* pick 1 tag and stick with it
* make sure you monitor related tags and re-tag posts that apply.
Wladimir (for example) does tagging triage while I sleep. I owe him dinner!
* whoever does tagging needs at least 500 reputation on the site:

http://stackoverflow.com/privileges/retag-questions

I cannot overstate how important SO is for a technology like Jetpack or
FxOS. Google's ranking of SO answers easily trumps most other responses,
at least for me. If people go to SO and see a bunch of unanswered
questions, it gives a bad and very public impression.

cheers, Jeff

[Kevin Dangoor]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 10:59 PM, Jeff Griffiths <jgrif...@mozilla.com>wrote:

> Some hints to handle this as a group:
>
> * pick 1 tag and stick with it
> * make sure you monitor related tags and re-tag posts that apply. Wladimir
> (for example) does tagging triage while I sleep. I owe him dinner!
> * whoever does tagging needs at least 500 reputation on the site:
>

> http://stackoverflow.com/**privileges/retag-questions<http://stackoverflow.com/privileges/retag-questions>

>
> I cannot overstate how important SO is for a technology like Jetpack or
> FxOS. Google's ranking of SO answers easily trumps most other responses, at
> least for me. If people go to SO and see a bunch of unanswered questions,
> it gives a bad and very public impression.
>

I agree with this and think that SO can be an important and useful support
channel, hopefully even more so than mailing lists.

As it is, we're directing people to Stack Overflow on the DevHub page for
Support:

https://marketplace.mozilla.org/developers/support

Right now, however, we're pointing them to the web-applications tag which
is *way* too broad. I agree that having one tag would be ideal, but I'm not
sure if one tag will suffice.

While firefox-os is a great tag for questions that are specific to Firefox
OS, I wonder if there's a better tag we could apply for app development
questions in general. Looking at the questions tagged with firefox-os, some
of them are general app-related questions. It would be good if we could
settle on a tag that we link to from the DevHub for app developers, not
just Firefox OS users.

Looking at the recipient list on this message, I do not want to create an 3
mailing list epic bikeshed color discussion on the topic of which tag(s) to
use for Stack Overflow, but I agree with Jeff that we need to quickly
settle in to a structure that we can support.

If you have thoughts on this or *want* to be a part of the bikeshedding,
please email me directly and we can run through it off list[1].

Kevin

[1] My intent here is not to be exclusive... I just want to let people get
actual work done :)

--
Kevin Dangoor

work: http://mozilla.com/
email: kdan...@mozilla.com <k...@blazingthings.com>
blog: http://www.BlueSkyOnMars.com

[Jeff Griffiths]

On 2012-10-31 7:07 AM, Kevin Dangoor wrote:
...

> Right now, however, we're pointing them to the web-applications tag
> which is *way* too broad. I agree that having one tag would be ideal,
> but I'm not sure if one tag will suffice.
>
> While firefox-os is a great tag for questions that are specific to
> Firefox OS, I wonder if there's a better tag we could apply for app
> development questions in general. Looking at the questions tagged with
> firefox-os, some of them are general app-related questions. It would be
> good if we could settle on a tag that we link to from the DevHub for app
> developers, not just Firefox OS users.
>
> Looking at the recipient list on this message, I do not want to create
> an 3 mailing list epic bikeshed color discussion on the topic of which
> tag(s) to use for Stack Overflow, but I agree with Jeff that we need to
> quickly settle in to a structure that we can support.
>
> If you have thoughts on this or *want* to be a part of the bikeshedding,
> please email me directly and we can run through it off list[1].

Picking one tag and re-tagging is great but you should also be curious
about what sorts of tags the original posters or the community assigns
to your questions and consider monitoring those as well if they prove
popular.

I can easily see people tagging anything related to the project with a
top-level tag like firefox-os, but this may become too noisy if there
are lots of questions in separate areas, for example porting fxos to
cyanogenmod vs hacking on Gaia vs strictly web app dev questions. We see
this with browser-addons vs firefox-addon vs firefox-addon-sdk.

Jeff