Google App Engine community support is moving to Stack Overflow

[Ikai Lan]

Hi App Engine Developers,

In the last few years, the Q&A website Stack Overflow has become an invaluable tool for developer communities. We’re pleased to announce that we are migrating to Stack Overflow as the official channel for answering development questions about Google App Engine.The google-appengine group will remain open for general discussions and announcements that are better suited for the groups format.

We believe that Stack Overflow is better platform for sharing knowledge and answering support questions given its larger community, de-duping of similar questions and contributor reputation system. We also expect that App Engine developers will be able to contribute and benefit from the wider range of language-related information not specific to App Engine. In addition, due to Stack Overflow’s use of OpenID for account management, developers will not need to create a new account to participate in the discussion - developers will be able to log in with any of the identity providers supported by Stack Overflow, including Google Accounts.

We plan on deprecating the App Engine language-specific groups, namely google-appengine-python and google-appengine-java. The google-appengine-go discussion group will continue to remain open for at least as long as the Go runtime is in experimental status.

The Python and Java groups will be placed into read-only on March 5th, 2012. While answering technical questions, we will begin nudging developers to ask their questions on Stack Overflow using the google-app-engine tag.

Please let us know if there are any questions or concerns about this announcement.

Happy coding!

- Ikai Lan, on behalf of the App Engine team

[Steve]

-1

The best way to accomplish a task in GAE (at least in the python runtime) seems to change, often significantly, over time.  I find the groups to be a better format for moving targets like GAE and Stack Overflow better for more established topics.

--Steve

[Maxim Lacrima]

I agree with Steve.

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[Prashant]

I also agree with Steve.

[Mos]

-1 for deprecating the GAE google-groups

On these groups we have so much discussions which are not simple Q&As.
It's good if questions are also answered on Stack Overflow.
But so much issues - e.g. the reoccurring bug with the null mimeType - are not Q&As which fits on Stack Overflow.
Instead GAE users needs a discussion forum with good support from your Google people.

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[Brandon Wirtz]

I figured people would be happy. I’m not on StackOverFlow, so moving to there means you don’t have to listen to me anymore.

 

My thoughts on the matter…

While I wanted a space that was more GAE for CTO’s / Project managers, which was why I pushed for www.cloudonastring.com as a discussion list, I recognize that Stack is not newb friendly, and a lot of the questions that come through here would not be treated nicely. 

 

Letting the Stack community handle questions likely lightens the load on GAE team to free them up to do other things, but moving the community to Stack also means that you open the community to poachers. People don’t troll here looking to say “you know Java on EC2 works really well” or you know that PyCloud will run all your GAE apps and doesn’t have the stupid 60 time out or scheduler issues.”

 

I have a couple of times told people who weren’t finding answer here to check Stack, because they are much better at doing things like “I have an N-node traveling salesman problem what is the most efficient way to handle it with the memory constraints of GAE’s F1 Instance”  but that is really about understanding that GAE can’t commit people to answer those questions, and most of the hardcore coders on this list get annoyed by the newbs, or don’t want to share info for free.

 

I stick around this group because as many of you have noticed and complained about, when I am testing a performance tweak GAE provides valuable insight about how the black box works, and users point me to pitfalls, or better optimizations.   That is something that Stack doesn’t encourage. (the would probably kick me for doing it)

I view this list as the half way between what I want and what the hard core coders want.  I don’t know if I think this announcement makes this list more that, or less that.

 

-Brandon

[Johan Euphrosine]

Hi Mos,

For things that are not "development questions" or doesn't fit Stack
Overflow, you are still free to use the groups, and if you find a bug,
filling an issue on the public tracker will always be appreciated by
the team and the community.

Note that we only plan to deprecated language specific groups (that is
google-appengine-python and google-appengine-java) were most of the
posts are development questions that really fit SO model.

Hope all that makes sense.

--
Johan Euphrosine (proppy)
Developer Programs Engineer
Google Developer Relations

[Johan Euphrosine]

Hi Steve,

While I'll agree that experimental feature might be subject to change
and deprecation, all the stable API [1] are here to stay and are
subject to the 3 years deprecation policy [2].

Also note that Stack Overflow questions and anwers can be edited over
time (like a wiki), unlike the groups where it is really difficult to
surface and update interesting content without creating a new thread.

[1] http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/features.html
[2] http://code.google.com/appengine/terms.html

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[Leandro Rezende]

-1

I loved waking up every morning and check the emails from this group, i always read almost everything, not even knowing what it is about, only to learn more about GAE, future problens i will have and future solutions

.

As a beginner, i would lose much if the group ends. =(

2012/2/7 Johan Euphrosine <pro...@google.com>

[Johan Euphrosine]

Hi Leandro,

Note that we do not plan to deprecate google-appengine@ group (only
the language specific groups google-appengine-python@ and
google-appengine-java@ where most posts fit the stack overflow Q&A
model).

You can also follow Stack Overflow by email by subscribing to a tag
[1], or with your prefered news reader through RSS [2].

Hope that helps.

[1] Over the google-appengine tag and click subscribe
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag/google-app-engine

[Johan Euphrosine]

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 12:09 PM, Brandon Wirtz <dra...@digerat.com> wrote:
> I figured people would be happy. I’m not on StackOverFlow, so moving to
> there means you don’t have to listen to me anymore.
>
>
>
> My thoughts on the matter…
>
> While I wanted a space that was more GAE for CTO’s / Project managers, which
> was why I pushed for www.cloudonastring.com as a discussion list, I
> recognize that Stack is not newb frien

We believe the model of Stack Overflow is more appropriate for this
because good content and contributor can be recognized as such through
the reputation system: one example is that you can easily identify the
answer to a question when coming from search without having to dig
into the abyss of multiple forum threads.dly, and a lot of the

questions that
> come through here would not be treated nicely.

Do you have examples of newbie questions that didn't get treated
nicely on Stack Overflow? People (include myself) often ask through
comments to edit the questions for including more information, but
that's really for increase the quality of the content there. The fact
that questions and answers can be edited like a wiki actually make it
less noisy than a long series of interleaved of posts asking for
technical details.

> Letting the Stack community handle questions likely lightens the load on GAE
> team to free them up to do other things, but moving the community to Stack
> also means that you open the community to poachers. People don’t troll here
> looking to say “you know Java on EC2 works really well” or you know that
> PyCloud will run all your GAE apps and doesn’t have the stupid 60 time out
> or scheduler issues.”

I'm not aware of any trolls or poachers on the google-app-engine tag,
and if they were any their answers are likely to get downvoted by the
community (you!).

On the contrary, answers are really focused on the topic raised by the
questions, and mentioning another platform on a questions tagged with
google-app-engine is likely to be considered offtopic and downvoted. I
have never seen answers there like the one you suggested.

> I have a couple of times told people who weren’t finding answer here to
> check Stack, because they are much better at doing things like “I have an
> N-node traveling salesman problem what is the most efficient way to handle
> it with the memory constraints of GAE’s F1 Instance”  but that is really
> about understanding that GAE can’t commit people to answer those questions,
> and most of the hardcore coders on this list get annoyed by the newbs, or
> don’t want to share info for free.

I believe redirecting people with development questions to Stack
Overflow is a good practice and thank you for doing that. However I
don't agree with your sentiment about the App Engine community, a lot
of people in the community are sharing information for free (including
Robert, Jeff, Moraes, you and others) here and on Stack Overflow.

> I stick around this group because as many of you have noticed and complained
> about, when I am testing a performance tweak GAE provides valuable insight
> about how the black box works, and users point me to pitfalls, or better
> optimizations.   That is something that Stack doesn’t encourage. (the would
> probably kick me for doing it)

The general group is still there for more general (but still
technical) discussions that are not a specific development questions
or don't fit Stack Overflow for any reasons. (IIRC you mostly
contribute to the general group anyway, and not language specific
groups like google-appengine-python/java).

> I view this list as the half way between what I want and what the hard core
> coders want.  I don’t know if I think this announcement makes this list more
> that, or less that.

The move from the language specific groups
(google-appengine-python/java) to Stack Overflow for answering
development questions is really about improving the Developer
Experience with a better tool for sharing knowledge.

We believe the model of Stack Overflow is more appropriate for this
because good contents and contributors can be recognized as such
through the reputation and curation system: one example is that you
can easily identify the answer to a question when coming from search
without having to dig into the abyss of multiple forum threads,
another one is that you can easily flag questions as duplicate, or
edit existing content (like a wiki) to improve its quality.clear
things up a bit

Hope that address your concerns.

[Johan Euphrosine]

(moving the discussion to google-appengine@)

Hi Matthew,

You can easily identify people with a specific level expertise on Stack Overflow by looking at their reputation or at previous questions they answered, and a good way to attract people on a question is to setup a bounty.

Members of the App Engine team and the community are already active on Stack Overflow, just take a look at the tag statistics and hopefully you will recognize a few people there :)

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/google-app-engine/topusers

In the top users you can see:

http://stackoverflow.com/users/818274/guido-van-rossum (Python and NDB daddy, App Engine Software Engineer)

http://stackoverflow.com/users/12030/nick-johnson (~59K reputation, App Engine Developer Relations)

http://stackoverflow.com/users/453278/dan-sanderson (Author of Programming Google App Engine, and working for Google)

http://stackoverflow.com/users/280474/robert-kluin (top group contributor)

http://stackoverflow.com/users/125967/moraes (webapp2 author)

http://stackoverflow.com/users/62288/dave-w-smith (App Engine Software Engineer, working on Map Reduce and testing)

http://stackoverflow.com/users/23786/moishe (App Engine Software Engineer, working on XMPP, Mail and Channel API)

http://stackoverflow.com/users/992563/amy-u (Author Google App Engine Java and GWT Application Development, App Engine Developer Relations)

http://stackoverflow.com/users/656408/proppy (myself, App Engine Developer Relations)

And many others I must have forgotten.

Hope that answers your concerns.

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 11:24 AM, Matthew Jaggard <mat...@jaggard.org.uk> wrote:

@Ikai - I think this is a great idea, however like Ruslan I'm a bit concerned about how much Google employees will be looking at the questions. Would it be possible for us to have a mechanism for raising to a Googler any questions that cannot be answered by the community. As a group we're able to deal with most simple problems or confirm bugs but it would be great to allow certain people - or people with a specific level of expertise - to bring questions to your attention.

@Ruslan - This is a good idea, raise an enhancement request and I'll happily star it. Or submit a patch?

Thanks,

Mat.

On 7 February 2012 02:31, Ruslan V <rus...@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Ikai,

Monday, February 6, 2012, 6:26:10 PM, you wrote:

It looks like your question has already been answered: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9124564/datastore-access-is-horribly-slow-on-dev-server-if-you-have-more-than-few-object The datastore stub is that: a stub. You cannot reliable depend on it for performance data.

It would be great if you guys allow engineers to replace the stub with custom implementation as it was done in gae-sqlite for Python version of SDK. Is there a chance of this happening ?

/Ruslan

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[Johan Euphrosine]

(moving the thread to google-appengine@)

You can subscribe to a specific tag through email (with multiple delivery options, include digest, etc ...), just over google-app-engine tag and click subscribe.

Hope that helps.

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Matthew Jaggard <mat...@jaggard.org.uk> wrote:

Hi Johan,

   I knew it's possible to identify someone's expertise - I was just asking whether they could raise difficult issues to Google employees, but I guess that' irrelevant if your're actively involved in answering questions already. The only other issue I've found when using Stack Overflow is how to get notified - at the moment I enjoy looking through the e-mails to this group and answering any that I can. Maybe the RSS will work for me. Then you just need to get GMail to support RSS feeds and we're sorted :-)

Thanks,

Mat.

[Tom Brander]

It seems that all vendors kind of hate support.. (and I understand that)

It also seems that there has been very little Google interaction here anyhow.

Great, committed support direct from the vendor is critical to platform success, always has been.

It does not bode well for responsive future support IMHO.. 

Does not bode well for GAE....

[Johan Euphrosine]

Hi Tom,

This announcement is about "Community support" which is offered by the
community and the App Engine team members as best effort.

Google does offer operational support for premier account, see:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/premier/index.html

We believe we can have a better engagement from both the community and
App Engine team members, if using Stack Overflow for development
questions instead of language specific groups.

Hope that helps to clarify the situation.

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[Daniel Florey]

I know that Google has grown to a large company and there may be many divisions not knowing each other well.

But from an outside view it is really sad that instead of fixing / improving existing Google products, teams are preferring an "easy workaround" like moving to Stack Overflow.

I've experienced this many times in different Google projects and this decision is by far not the worst example, but I don't think it is a good idea anyway.

It was great when Google worked on Wave using gwt, which lead to many improvements to gwt in a short time. Why not working closely with the guys working on groups to add the missing features?

I'd prefer to use all the services with my google account integrated into the navbar when working with the google stack.

So in short: Eat your own dog food ;-)

Daniel

[Andrin von Rechenberg]

My main concern is that I will miss many of the questions & answers,

because I will have to manually go an check StackOverflow.

Is there a way to get a daily StackOverflow digest email?

Cheers,

-Andrin

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[Johan Euphrosine]

Yes, you can subscribe to google-app-engine tag by email: just over
the tag name and click subscribe.

More details on the following post:
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/subscribe-to-tags-via-emai/

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[Bart Thate]

If you are on IRC freenode i just made a channel where my bot spams the RSS feed of stackoverflow. Channel is #appengine-overflow ;]

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 4:27 PM, Andrin von Rechenberg <and...@miumeet.com> wrote:

My main concern is that I will miss many of the questions & answers,

because I will have to manually go an check StackOverflow.

Is there a way to get a daily StackOverflow digest email?

Cheers,

-Andrin

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[Johan Euphrosine]

Hi Daniel,

We observed that more and more people use Stack Overflow for asking
development questions about App Engine:
- 107 questions Last 7 Days
- 461 questions Last 30 Days

And regularly development questions are posted on the language
specific groups, appear to be already answered on Stack Overflow (a
quick search on a particular topic often shows Stack Overflow Q&As as
their first results).

We believe that by focusing on 1 platform for development questions
(instead of having google-appengine-java, google-appengine-python and
Stack Overflow), we could create a better developer experience for App
Engine by improving the quality of community support.

Part of this decision is also about officially moving community
support where developers are already going for their development
questions, and we believe Stack Overflow is becoming the preferred
destination for this.

Hope that helps you to understand the rational of this decision.

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 4:20 PM, Daniel Florey <daniel...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Ikai Lan (Google)]

I think it's unfair to compare groups to StackOverflow. There's still nothing better in my book for a good ol' fashioned, directed discussion. But as it turns out, groups is really less than optimal for asking questions about code. And that's okay: StackOverflow is a highly specialized tool that makes it very easy for developers to look for answers to their questions. With groups, while you're in the flow of a discussion, it might be easy to reconcile the back-and-forth as it develops to find the answers you're looking for, but the tradeoff is that it also leaves a lot of data in an intermediary, incomplete state that can be confusing to developers. 

Daniel, there are no easy solutions anywhere. Use an outside solution and be criticized for not drinking our own champagne. Use our own solution and be criticized for "Not Invented Here" syndrome. At the end of the day, the question is really this: what's best for developers? The evidence from other Google teams that have made this move indicates that officially moving community support to StackOverflow and keeping a single discussion group seems to give us the best of all worlds. It'll take a little bit of time to get used to it, but my suspicion is that people are going to be happier in the long run (it's my experience that there hasn't been a single change in the history of software that wasn't met with grumpiness).

There's some really good feedback here about getting updates for questions. StackOverflow has both RSS and email notifications, but there are definitely places where their email notifications can be improved. Maybe we can rig something up to email new questions to people.

Anyway, this is the sort of discussion that thrives here in the Groups, and it's why we're not shutting them down. Keep it coming!

--

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

plus.ikailan.com

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[Robert Kluin]

Cool Bart. That might make it easier to keep up with the questions there!

Robert

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[Robert Kluin]

I think directing a lot of the specific coding type questions to SO is
good. It has nice support for things like syntax highlighting built
in, and it is *far* better indexed. It also gives users the ability
to edit / cleanup / clarify questions based on feed back, and for
users to de-dupe questions. Basically, it is a nice tool for coding
QnA type stuff.

The only negative aspect in my mind is that it does not facilitate
discussion in quite the same way. However, as Johan and Ikai have
pointed out, this group will still be here for discussions. Here if
one sees a question that has been "answered" then follows up with a
more detailed explanation or caveats, it probably gets more attention
than on SO. I know I don't generally follow old questions on SO.
Here they pop up and I see them.

Anyways, I think this will be an overall positive move.

Robert

[Andrin von Rechenberg]

Ha, great!

Wasn't logged in so I didn't see it.

Cheers,

-Andrin

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[Brandon Wirtz]

> Do you have examples of newbie questions that didn't get treated nicely on
> Stack Overflow?

Most have them have been cleaned up, but why do you think I don't hang out
there? D-Nice, Necronet and a few others have flamed me for asking simple
questions, usually about "simple" Java things.

So even when the answer looks nice in hind sight, the Realtime experience is
shit.

> I'm not aware of any trolls or poachers on the google-app-engine tag, and
if
> they were any their answers are likely to get downvoted by the community
> (you!).

You haven't been paying attention. My guys get contacted through their
OverFlow Specific email CONSTANTLY about other services, usually
CloudFoundry related, but Generally 2-3 mails per post about Django, 10 if
they post about a Java technology. They have gone to all sharing a single
login for work stuff, to cut down on the spam.

[Brandon Wirtz]

Is there a way to get a daily StackOverflow digest email?

 

Cheers,

-Andrin

 

 

You can get emails about your question, you can get an rss of a tag.

 

It is a wiki so both are kind of weird. And there is not a good way to “sponge” the info the way I do with emails that I can then sort offline, or say to my self… I think Andrin asked that but I didn’t really read it at the time.

 

[Andreas]

yes, once you subscribe for a tag you can edit the email settings on that subscriptions.

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[Johan Euphrosine]

On Feb 7, 2012 9:32 PM, "Brandon Wirtz" <dra...@digerat.com> wrote:
>
> > Do you have examples of newbie questions that didn't get treated nicely on
> > Stack Overflow?
>
> Most have them have been cleaned up, but why do you think I don't hang out
> there?  D-Nice, Necronet and a few others have flamed me for asking simple
> questions, usually about "simple" Java things.
>
> So even when the answer looks nice in hind sight, the Realtime experience is
> shit.

That's not my experience, but as someone mainly answering questions on the google-app-engine tag I might be biased.

> > I'm not aware of any trolls or poachers on the google-app-engine tag, and
> if
> > they were any their answers are likely to get downvoted by the community
> > (you!).
>
> You haven't been paying attention.  My guys get contacted through their
> OverFlow Specific email CONSTANTLY about other services, usually
> CloudFoundry related, but Generally 2-3 mails per post about Django, 10 if
> they post about a Java technology. They have gone to all sharing a single
> login for work stuff, to cut down on the spam.

That's really weird because stack overflow doesn't seem to allow private messaging between users.
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/431/any-way-to-send-a-personal-message-to-another-user

And they seems to really value the fact that all communication between users are public and scoped to a specific question.

Maybe your collaborators included their email addresses in their profile and that got harvested from here, who knows.

But feel free to share your feedback about stack overflow and google-app-engine tag again if you decide to revisit it in the future.

>
>
>
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[osrdg]

This is an excellent move ! 

[Daniel Florey]

Hi,

I did not want to offend anyone. 

I just think it would make perfectly sense to improve Groups to allow users to rate posts and display the best answer on top etc. 

Especially if you take into account that Groups is also used as the Google Apps help system.

We are using almost all Google products actively including many of the dev tools and I had the impression that since introducing G+ Google recently tried to streamline the offerings. 

There are also many way I can think of to improve the Groups experience by adding some G+ stuff - which is very unlikely to happen in SO.

I know that the decision is made and I'll have to get used to SO, but I hope it will get reverted anytime soon - as it happend to the "old" "new" Google Help system ;-)

Cheers,
Daniel

[Johan Euphrosine]

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 1:16 PM, Daniel Florey <daniel...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I did not want to offend anyone. 

Hey, you are not offending anyone: discussion is always welcome here.

 

I just think it would make perfectly sense to improve Groups to allow users to rate posts and display the best answer on top etc. 

Especially if you take into account that Groups is also used as the Google Apps help system.

Yes, I agree those would be very nice feature to have in groups.

 

We are using almost all Google products actively including many of the dev tools and I had the impression that since introducing G+ Google recently tried to streamline the offerings. 

That's exactly what we are trying to do by doing this, streamlining the developer experience by having a place for each thing:

- Want to start a technical discussion, go to the General Group

- Want to ask a development question, go to Stack Overflow

- Want to report a bug, go to the Public issue tracker

Instead of having things scattered across multiple groups, and multiple platforms with a lot of duplicate along the way

 

There are also many way I can think of to improve the Groups experience by adding some G+ stuff - which is very unlikely to happen in SO.

In fact a "Share on Google+" button recently poped on Stack Overflow :)

 

I know that the decision is made and I'll have to get used to SO, but I hope it will get reverted anytime soon - as it happend to the "old" "new" Google Help system ;-)

Indeed, things are not set in stone and encouraging people to ask development question on Stack Overflow is also motivated by the populary of the google-app-engine tag rising there.

We will continue to follow up with developer tool trends, and adapt our community support to it.

Hope that helps you to understand better our motivations.

Cheers,
Daniel

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[Geoffrey Spear]

On Feb 8, 7:52 am, Johan Euphrosine <pro...@google.com> wrote:
> > I just think it would make perfectly sense to improve Groups to allow
> > users to rate posts and display the best answer on top etc.
> > Especially if you take into account that Groups is also used as the Google
> > Apps help system.
>
> Yes, I agree those would be very nice feature to have in groups.

Rating posts is a very nice feature we *did* have in groups. Someone
from the App Engine team needs to infiltrate the Groups team and put
it back.

[Mauricio Aristizabal]

I like it!  I was already spending more time over at SO than here for AppEngine questions, and it's much easier to find what you're looking for there: The search results are better, and the related articles will often have what you needed if you didn't already find it.  Also, this should increase AppEngine awareness among the wider Python and Java developer communities that use SO heavily.

[Jeff Schnitzer]

What's a good workflow for dealing with stackoverflow that doesn't involve going and checking on the actual website?  If it doesn't show up in my inbox or RSS reader (or sometimes hackernews) it might as well not exist to me.

So far getting an email digest for the google-app-engine just does not cut it.  My workflow here in Gmail is reasonable - I have a list of all the appengine-related emails stored in a label, with filters that automatically star messages a few choice keywords.  The stackoverflow digest not only evades my priority filter but actually forces me to read through a lengthy email.  Not going to happen.

Is RSS the way to go?  Any special tricks?

Jeff

[Johan Euphrosine]

Hi Jeff,

You can also check this Chrome extension which tracks pending
questions for a list of tags:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bnnkhapbhkejookmhgpgaikfdoegkmdp

Currently the lowest level of granularly for email is a digest every
15 min, monitoring tag RSS feeds with an email gateway (built on App
Engine!) might be a good way to get instant email notification for
individual question.

There seems to be a few projects already doing that:
https://github.com/jmhobbs/RSS-Engine

Let us know if you would be interested by setting up something like
this for the community.

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[Brandon Wirtz]

>Is RSS the way to go?  Any special tricks?

 

I have my personal assistant read all the messages and flag the important ones, and occasionally post my canned response if I have posted the same thing more than once.  Probably getting your PA to do the same would be good, at least until he/she can build a set of filters to do all of that for you.

[Jeff Schnitzer]

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 10:13 AM, Brandon Wirtz <dra...@digerat.com> wrote:

>Is RSS the way to go?  Any special tricks?

 

I have my personal assistant read all the messages and flag the important ones, and occasionally post my canned response if I have posted the same thing more than once.  Probably getting your PA to do the same would be good, at least until he/she can build a set of filters to do all of that for you.

I fear that Neptune has not blessed me with such minions.  Perhaps I'm wearing the wrong outfit :-)

I'll try adding the tags to Google Reader.  The Chrome Plugin is interesting but it's still outside my normal workflow.  I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about this particular change, although I can see the greater good.

Jeff

[Brandon Wirtz]

>I fear that Neptune has not blessed me with such minions.  Perhaps I'm wearing the wrong outfit :-)

 

Do you have kids. I hear they can be trained.  I have a Cat. She doesn’t do so well with keyboard dexterity which is why there are so many typos in my posts on days Ivy (PA) isn’t in the office

[Ikai Lan (Google)]

Brandon, can you set your font back to normal? For some reason I find that my eyes tend to scan past the blue Times New Roman (that is Times, right?). I don't want to miss your messages because the more you post, the more ammunition I can collect for trolling you =P.

Jeff, a few of us are using RSS to track new questions. Example feed URL:

http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag?tagnames=google-app-engine&sort=newest

--

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

plus.ikailan.com

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 8:49 AM, Brandon Wirtz <dra...@digerat.com> wrote:

 

>I fear that Neptune has not blessed me with such minions.  Perhaps I'm wearing the wrong outfit :-)

 

Do you have kids. I hear they can be trained.  I have a Cat. She doesn’t do so well with keyboard dexterity which is why there are so many typos in my posts on days Ivy (PA) isn’t in the office

--

[Robert Kluin]

This is actually my biggest complaint about SO as well. It is far
outside my usual workflow. I also prefer the "gmail groups
interface." I guess I need to try the RSS stuff, but I don't
currently watch any RSS feeds -- so this is outside my normal flow as
well.

Robert

[Jeff Schnitzer]

I don't mind the font, but Brandon whatever you're doing now shows a vertical bar to the left of your content exactly the same as Gmail formats quoted content.  I keep going through your posts and wondering where the new text is only to realize that it is masquerading as quoted content.  Example:

https://img.skitch.com/20120209-nsxbc5tuqf58fmfc4nxmhxp8fs.jpg

Jeff

[Johan Euphrosine]

I think that might be due to:
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 14.0

--

[Robert Kluin]

I also started noticing that on Brandon's posts a day or two ago I think.

Robert

[Brandon Wirtz]

> >> Brandon, can you set your font back to normal?�For some reason I find
> >> that my eyes tend to scan past the blue Times New Roman (that is Times,
> right?).

I live in outlook, I'm trying to pick settings that work for all of you and
for me internally... and things get messed up when I reply in HTML Mode.

But the fix I had pissed off the Azure forum guys.

I am considering setting up an email address just for GAE, but I like that
right now it all dumps in with my other cloud forums... Oh well.

[Daniel Florey]

Am I the only one using the new Groups interface??

Right now everything is perfect for me as I can see at first sight how many new topics have been discussed in all my ~20 Google related groups.

Is there a similar view in SO? 

[MLTrim]

I'm a Stack Overflow user and I really appreciate this move; thank you
for this.
For the reluctant of this change, fiddle with Stack Overflow for a
couple of weeks and you'll be addicted.
Michele
[Systempuntoout]

[Andrin von Rechenberg]

Hey guys

Short version:

Problem solved, just subscribe to: google-appengin...@googlegroups.com

You will receive every new question & answer in your favorite email client.

Long version:

I like stackoverflow when I'm googling, but I prefer gmail in my workflow

for being part of the community.

So I spent the afternoon hacking a tool together that crawls the rss feeds

of StackOverflow every 5 minutes and checks whats new and mails it out.

This could be done for any StackOverflow tag, I built a generic tool:

http://stack-over-mail.appspot.com

Of course it runs on AppEngine.

It's running on free quota, so until someone sponsors it, please dont

subscribe to super heavy tags like "java"...

I'll open-source the source code soonish.

Cheers,

-Andrin

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[Andrin von Rechenberg]

Oh one more thing: You are on the bleeding edge if you subscribe. There are no unittests.

I'm adding in-reply-to & references headers now.

However in AppEngine I dont know the Message-ID, so I'm just going to use the

stackoverflow id. Will that help? Does anyone know?

[Andreas]

andrin this looks and sounds amazing! thx

[Andrin von Rechenberg]

Thanks.

I know that sometimes the message order is screwed up.

The problem is that if a reply is posted to a question that

the tool hasnt seen so far, it sends the question and the

reply at the same time and the reply arrives before the

question in the google groups. Typical race condition,

but with email :)

I will delay the sending of a reply if the tool hasn't

seen the question before. But I'm off drinking with

the guys now. im already late. Anyways, the problem

will fix itself, once the tool knows all questions, which

will be soonish I hope.

Cheers,

-Andrin

[Francois Masurel]

Great work Andrin, I just joined the group.

I noticed that lots of messages are not directly related to GAE but are rather about applications running on App Engine.

Time will tell if SO was the right solution for GAE languages groups.

May be you could create specialized groups like google-appengine-java-stacko...@googlegroups.com :-)

Thanx again.

Francois

[Andrin von Rechenberg]

If there is a tag for that you can create a mail forward for it on stack-over-mail.appspot.com :)
Its generic...

Cheers,
-Andrin

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[Robert Kluin]

Awesome! You stole what was going to be an evening project this weekend. ;)

Looking forwards to checking this out.

Robert

[Rick Mangi]

Ive gotten my head bit off on stack-overflow for answering a question
in a way that the reader didn't agree with, but then again, at least
people answer questions there. I've yet to have a question asked in
the GAE-java google group get answered. Most of them are just ignored.


On Feb 7, 3:32 pm, "Brandon Wirtz" <drak...@digerat.com> wrote:
> > Do you have examples of newbie questions that didn't get treated nicely on
> > Stack Overflow?
>
> Most have them have been cleaned up, but why do you think I don't hang out
> there?  D-Nice, Necronet and a few others have flamed me for asking simple
> questions, usually about "simple" Java things.
>
> So even when the answer looks nice in hind sight, the Realtime experience is
> shit.
>
>
>
> > I'm not aware of any trolls or poachers on the google-app-engine tag, and
> if
> > they were any their answers are likely to get downvoted by the community
> > (you!).
>
> You haven't been paying attention.  My guys get contacted through their
> OverFlow Specific email CONSTANTLY about other services, usually
> CloudFoundry related, but Generally 2-3 mails per post about Django, 10 if
> they post about a Java technology. They have gone to all sharing a single
> login for work stuff, to cut down on the spam.

[Supercobra Thatbytes]

I think this is a terrible idea because it makes people check 2 places and subscribe to 2 boards. Newcomers to this discussion will have a hard time knowing about this.

App Engine team does put enough resources for community and customer support. I have a paid app and I cannot get my simple billing questions answered. In the billing interface, there is no link or phone # to use. Just a link to this forum... unless we pay become a Premier Account for $500 / month but first we need to talk to the sales team. Really? So desperate users in need of urgent help post questions on forums and if they make enough noise and show enough distress, others users help them and sometimes, in with their immense goodwill and too little available time, Google Engineers help too.

Google App Engine team says, 'well support is best effort around here or get a Premier Account'. I think this is not the way to do it. Together with Google engineers, WE make Google products what they are because of our deep involvement. 

This lack of support is general across most Google products. Our company uses many Google products that are now business critical for us: Google Apps for Business, Checkout, Analytics, and more. With all of those, if you have a problem, well, it's your problem because you cannot contact anyone. 

So is it hard to provide good support? Not for every company. We use Amazon S3 and Cloud Service. We are a little tiny customers for them. The other day we had a problem that brought down our SaaS app. Emergency. What do you do when that happens? Well, simple. On Amazon AWS console, click on 'call me I need help now' button and a human calls you within a minute. 

So Google: use a tiny portion of the immense net revenue to add more community and product support engineers. I bet that will improve the bottom line even further.

One last BIG concern. One of the things that first get dropped when a product is going to be retired (i.e. killed) is developer and community support. Java and Python appengine discussion groups are being deprecated and dev support is moved to Stack Overflow. That does not sound like App Engine is going forward to me. More like a huge red flag. Is App Engine business in danger?

Telling Google users to use Stack Overflow is the equivalent of displaying a big sign on Google Groups home page saying "use Stack Overflow, it's much better than what we have".

As other users suggested, Google should improve this forum software and make it work more like Stack Overflow and not move there... 

[Daniel Florey]

Hi,

I've been thinking about the decision to move to SO for some more time and I'd like to give a more general feedback.

We are developing apps for the Google ecosystem using the Google dev stack (gwt, gae, galgwt, gdata api, google apps marketplace, chrome webstore etc.)

See: http://www.floreysoft.net/download/SS377-1109_floreysoft_v1.pdf

Beside our premier account for the apps running on our own domain we also have ~2000 clients running dedicated installations of our tools on app engine, many of them with billing enabled. So most of our generated revenue goes directly to the GAE team ;-)

As we are using many tools from Google, not just GAE, my perspective on the decision to move to SO may be slightly different than the GAE team's point of view:

In my daily life I already have to use different channels to get support from Google:

- For GAE related issues I've to use the Enterprise Support Portal using Salesforce.com

- Using ~20 Google groups for the other api's/projects

- Issue trackers for the different projects

- Mail/Chat with Google Dev Advocates

- Blogs/Google+

In general the support is good as most developers are very responsive. My main concern is that the different teams / projects are working quite isolated.

Working in smaller teams of course is more efficient and more fun, but when it comes to support I would prefer a single point of contact.

It would be perfect to be able to address any issue to the Enterprise Portal (or any other channel) and to trigger some kind of internal dispatch to the proper team.

Let me give you an example:

We are using the Google Java Stack (Google Plugin/GWT/GAE) to create our apps for multiple locales/browsers, GWT generates dozens of permutations of our app. As GAE only supports 150mb project size, we are hitting this limit - as you have to divide this limit by the number of permutations to get the "real" max app size. It would be possible to e.g. serve gwt fragments from the blobstore, but this would involve all the different teams.

I've been totally lost to find the appropriate channel to communicate this issue as every tool itself is working fine, just the combination of them causes the pain.

I wonder if there is anybody responsible for taking care of the big picture of the google dev tools. There are some indicators that there may be someone with the big plan (e.g. new api console, streamlined documentation), but there are many overlapping developments and new projects not really linked into each other (e.g. gitkit/appengine user service) that I'm still confused.

In general decisions regarding how to provide support should be made on a higher level. If Google decides to use SO as the primary channel for answering questions of developers, at least all projects providing dev tools should use SO.

Don't get me wrong: I still believe that the most brilliant minds are working for Google, but as Google rapidly grows, I have the feeling that especially the enterprise support is not yet adequate...and deciding on a per-team basis which channels to establish is the wrong move IMO.

Daniel

[Johan Euphrosine]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your feedback, I understand your concerns about finding the
right support channel when your project overlap more than one Google
Technology and I agree that's something that should be improved.

Until now we relied on silo'ed Google groups (per language, per
technologies) and part of the move to Stack Overflow is to try to find
a solution to scale community support more easily for App Engine
development questions that span across multiple technologies.

By using multiple tags for their questions, developers are now able to
target more than one community: you can see an example of related tags
on the dedicated page for each tags:

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/google-app-engine/topusers
python× 3541
java× 2035
gae-datastore× 1084
django× 644
gwt× 387

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/gwt/topusers
java× 2152
javascript× 446
google-app-engine× 387
eclipse× 325
css× 256

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/google-maps/topusers
javascript× 2196
android× 1383
google-maps-api-3× 1273
jquery× 595
google× 532

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/android/topusers
java× 18131
android-layout× 5143
listview× 4293
eclipse× 3615
sqlite× 3484

Hope that answers some of your concerns about the move.

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[Mos]

+111
absolute agreement;   I would like to hear an official statement from Google regarding long time commitment to GAE ( incl. plans regarding adequate support options).

Google, has the best developers in the world. It has so much money to burn. It has the best internet-infrastructure on this planet.
If Google would like, I'm sure a self implemented "StackOverflow" for Google-Products would be ready in three month from now.
And now they decide to outsource this one to the .NET based StackOverflow, that just lost his founder and brain Jeff Atwood?

That really doesn't look like Google has any plans to invest in better enterprise support or make GAE a first class Google product.

I hope I'm wrong....

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[Andrin von Rechenberg]

About "Google using StackOverflow and not building it itself":

If you are working at Google Scale, you don't build StackOverflow in 3 months.

If you are a StartUp, you build a primitive version of StackOverflow in a day and launch.

If you are working at Google it will take you at least 12 month to launch something like

StackOverflow. Google's Product are so well implemented, tested, productionized and

legally sound that it just takes a shit load of time getting something out of the door.

What's wrong with using well established, well working 3rd party software?

About long time commitment:

GAE is out of beta. This means long-time commitment.

See: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/11/app-engine-160-out-of-preview-release.html

Quote: "Google is making a long term investment in App Engine!"

Cheers,

-Andrin

[Mos]

> What's wrong with using well established, well working 3rd party software?

Check this thread for arguments. Summary:

 - People need to check 2 different places/systems to find the official GAE support-groups  (confusing; especially for newcomers)
 - Getting answers from Google stuff directly will be even worse because it's outsourced and not "owned" by Google
 - Faith in GAE is reduced if the official support forums are outsourced to the community.
 - Stackoverflow is a good format for Q&A  but bad if there are discussions about Java or Python regarding Features/Roadmaps/Bug-Discussions/Reminder/Collaboration or what ever.
 - Google is not able to control the support workflow anymore   (usually they like to have everything important in their influence, don't they?)

The advantage of StackOverflow is the better structure for question and answers. That's for sure!
But as people suggested, Google could improve this forum and make it a little more StackOverflowish.
(I don't believe this would take 12 month, even in a big company like Google. It's still moving very fast, isn't it?)

Or stay with the forum, add a FAQ-Posting for recurring questions and always link to StackOverflow if the answer is there.
Many other software support forums are doing it this way....
And by the way:  Most people that have a GAE problem or question are searching for it on Google. If the answer is on StackOverflow they
get it. Mostly ranked higher then these forum postings. I don't think there is a big problem with redundant questions on this forum.
The problem seems to be another one....

Cheers
Mos

[Gregory D'alesandre]

Hi Mos,

Google is absolutely committed to App Engine and part of the reason we are moving the Java/Python groups to StackOverflow is to have better, more consolidated answers to questions.  While it might be possible for Google to build its own tool tailed to questions and answers, we really like StackOverflow in part because it is where a lot of developers go in general to get answers to questions.  As I've talked about on this group before, we currently have essentially 2 support options: Premier Accounts (for $500/month) or StackOverflow / Groups where the community can support it and Googlers will sometimes answer questions.  The first has an SLA and the second does not.  So, in response to Google investing in better enterprise support, I hope that answers the question.  

In terms of the concern that this means we are trying to deprecate App Engine.  I can honestly and frankly say that there are no plans to do so, quite the opposite, we are growing!  Right now we are trying to consolidate a variety of places to get answers into 1 to improve how people get questions answered.  We are keeping this group (google-appengine) because it is a great place for discussions, but when it comes to asking a question and getting an answer, we believe StackOverflow is a product more suited to do this.

Johan and Ikai both work on the App Engine team so their word is as official as mine, but I figured hearing it from more people might help.

Greg D'Alesandre

Senior Product Manager, Google App Engine

PS - Nice app Andrin, I'm already signed up! :)

[Ikai Lan (Google)]

Supercobra,

I share your concerns about streamlining the user experience. As it stands, the user experience isn't great: you have groups, StackOverflow, billing issues forms, abuse forms, the public issues tracker, Google Groups, Reddit ... I could probably go on. The move to StackOverflow isn't necessarily  making things more complicated, as our documentation will to updated to reflect that it is the primary destination for code questions - and in exchange, the Python/Java groups will be placed into read-only. We've done this with other products at Google such as Android and experienced overwhelming success - not only will App Engine Java questions be exposed to developers following App Engine, they will also be exposed to tens of thousands of Java developers on StackOverflow. And the tooling! The tooling will allow us to identify where we need better learning resources, or where the product needs improvements. We could certainly build this ourselves, but that detracts from our ability to answer questions, launch features, and improve the documentation. There are always tradeoffs in those scenarios. 

Hope this helps,

--

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

plus.ikailan.com

[Brandon Wirtz]

Ikai,

 

>Supercobra

 

I want to be in the meeting where you present to your manager the reaction to the news of the move to StackOverflow.

 

“Well, over all I think the most of the community is behind it, but Supercobra, and Brandon, the guy in the mermaid costume, have expressed some concerns”

 

“Really? Did you ask G.I. Joe and Batman what they think?“

 

 

[supercobra]

> “Well, over all I think the most of the community is behind it, but Supercobra, and
> Brandon, the guy in the mermaid costume, have expressed some concerns”
>
> “Really? Did you ask G.I. Joe and Batman what they think?“

supercobra's opinion is more important than batman's, because batman
can't code all that well anyway

[Daniel Florey]

Hi Greg,

regarding the support:

It was my understanding that enterprise support (premier account) will only be responsible to handle urgent issues (GAE problems affecting production apps). 

Or can we use the enterprise support also to get more general help regarding implementation patterns etc.? This would of course be very nice, but I'd also prefer to share all valuable information with the community.

Example: We've had problems with the channel api (token can not be renewed after 2 hrs timeout) and received a very smart workaround from enterprise support that greatly helped us. I've posted this answer on the GAE group to help others facing the same issue, but I would prefer if this would be handled by the enterprise support people to make sure that valuable info never gets lost.

Thanks,

Daniel

[Daniel Florey]

I just realized that all the nice feature are already available in Google Groups. Checkout this post:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/google-plus-developers/n0i53XYAM8E 

You can see that the Google+ group has all the features enabled that we are talking about: Asking questions, rating answers, displaying best answer on top, tagging questions etc.

So it would easily be possible to create a GAE group that holds all the questions with different tags (java,python,datastore etc) and still keep the advantages of Google Group (number of new posts in group overview, seamless integration into the Google experience etc.)

The only valid argument left for the SO move IMO is that it may be a good way to convince java folks not yet addicted to GAE by flooding SO with GAE praising posts.

As it finally looks like a "marketing" driven decision to me I'm out of arguments and will patiently wait until sanity wins ;-)

Daniel

[Francois Masurel]

Hey Daniel, you're right!

Googlers, why can't we have such nice rating tools for GAE groups?   It would be great.

[supercobra]

> https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/google-plus-developers/n0i53XYAM8E

This is very cool. +1 for using that.

[Johan Euphrosine]

Hi Daniel,

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 10:45 AM, Daniel Florey <daniel...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I just realized that all the nice feature are already available in Google
> Groups. Checkout this post:
> https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/google-plus-developers/n0i53XYAM8E
>
> You can see that the Google+ group has all the features enabled that we are
> talking about: Asking questions, rating answers, displaying best answer on
> top, tagging questions etc.
> So it would easily be possible to create a GAE group that holds all the
> questions with different tags (java,python,datastore etc) and still keep the
> advantages of Google Group (number of new posts in group overview, seamless
> integration into the Google experience etc.)

I enabled the new group interface for google-appengine group and
created a couple of tags (let me know if I forgot any):
python
java
go
python27
datastore
memcache
taskqueue
blobstore
channel
mail
users
backend
urlfetch
xmpp
files
mapreduce
protorpc
openid
storage
prospectivesearch
conversion
remoteapi

Feel free to use this when Stack Overflow doesn't fit your needs.

> The only valid argument left for the SO move IMO is that it may be a good
> way to convince java folks not yet addicted to GAE by flooding SO with GAE
> praising posts.
> As it finally looks like a "marketing" driven decision to me I'm out of
> arguments and will patiently wait until sanity wins ;-)

As Greg said, one of the principal reason for moving development
questions to Stack Overflow is to go where a lot of developer already
go to get answers to questions. I have never seen marketing content on
Stack Overflow and if there is any it is likely to be downvoted by the
community.

Hope you will enjoy the new group interface ;)

[Daniel Florey]

This is very cool! Thanks a lot.

Is there a way to enable this feature for my own group? I did not find the magic switch.

Daniel

[Switch]

AdWords communities (6 languages) also just moved to a 3rd party platform:

www.en.adwords-community.com

www.de.adwords-community.com

etc.

Switch

[Purmou]

All right! Start rolling in the herds.

Stack Overflow is an excellent community of highly dedicated programmers. You are very likely to get an answer to most of your questions within a few hours. There is such a powerful sense of friendliness on the site, which I think is valuable camaraderie among fellow programmers.

I believe you will all enjoy your time on Stack Overflow!

On Monday, February 6, 2012 6:14:54 PM UTC-8, Ikai Lan wrote:

Hi App Engine Developers,

In the last few years, the Q&A website Stack Overflow has become an invaluable tool for developer communities. We’re pleased to announce that we are migrating to Stack Overflow as the official channel for answering development questions about Google App Engine.The google-appengine group will remain open for general discussions and announcements that are better suited for the groups format.

We believe that Stack Overflow is better platform for sharing knowledge and answering support questions given its larger community, de-duping of similar questions and contributor reputation system. We also expect that App Engine developers will be able to contribute and benefit from the wider range of language-related information not specific to App Engine. In addition, due to Stack Overflow’s use of OpenID for account management, developers will not need to create a new account to participate in the discussion - developers will be able to log in with any of the identity providers supported by Stack Overflow, including Google Accounts.

We plan on deprecating the App Engine language-specific groups, namely google-appengine-python and google-appengine-java. The google-appengine-go discussion group will continue to remain open for at least as long as the Go runtime is in experimental status.

The Python and Java groups will be placed into read-only on March 5th, 2012. While answering technical questions, we will begin nudging developers to ask their questions on Stack Overflow using the google-app-engine tag.

Please let us know if there are any questions or concerns about this announcement.

Happy coding!

- Ikai Lan, on behalf of the App Engine team

On Monday, February 6, 2012 6:14:54 PM UTC-8, Ikai Lan wrote:

Hi App Engine Developers,

In the last few years, the Q&A website Stack Overflow has become an invaluable tool for developer communities. We’re pleased to announce that we are migrating to Stack Overflow as the official channel for answering development questions about Google App Engine.The google-appengine group will remain open for general discussions and announcements that are better suited for the groups format.

We believe that Stack Overflow is better platform for sharing knowledge and answering support questions given its larger community, de-duping of similar questions and contributor reputation system. We also expect that App Engine developers will be able to contribute and benefit from the wider range of language-related information not specific to App Engine. In addition, due to Stack Overflow’s use of OpenID for account management, developers will not need to create a new account to participate in the discussion - developers will be able to log in with any of the identity providers supported by Stack Overflow, including Google Accounts.

We plan on deprecating the App Engine language-specific groups, namely google-appengine-python and google-appengine-java. The google-appengine-go discussion group will continue to remain open for at least as long as the Go runtime is in experimental status.

The Python and Java groups will be placed into read-only on March 5th, 2012. While answering technical questions, we will begin nudging developers to ask their questions on Stack Overflow using the google-app-engine tag.

Please let us know if there are any questions or concerns about this announcement.

Happy coding!

- Ikai Lan, on behalf of the App Engine team

On Monday, February 6, 2012 6:14:54 PM UTC-8, Ikai Lan wrote:

Hi App Engine Developers,

In the last few years, the Q&A website Stack Overflow has become an invaluable tool for developer communities. We’re pleased to announce that we are migrating to Stack Overflow as the official channel for answering development questions about Google App Engine.The google-appengine group will remain open for general discussions and announcements that are better suited for the groups format.

We believe that Stack Overflow is better platform for sharing knowledge and answering support questions given its larger community, de-duping of similar questions and contributor reputation system. We also expect that App Engine developers will be able to contribute and benefit from the wider range of language-related information not specific to App Engine. In addition, due to Stack Overflow’s use of OpenID for account management, developers will not need to create a new account to participate in the discussion - developers will be able to log in with any of the identity providers supported by Stack Overflow, including Google Accounts.

We plan on deprecating the App Engine language-specific groups, namely google-appengine-python and google-appengine-java. The google-appengine-go discussion group will continue to remain open for at least as long as the Go runtime is in experimental status.

The Python and Java groups will be placed into read-only on March 5th, 2012. While answering technical questions, we will begin nudging developers to ask their questions on Stack Overflow using the google-app-engine tag.

Please let us know if there are any questions or concerns about this announcement.

Happy coding!

- Ikai Lan, on behalf of the App Engine team

[Brandon Wirtz]

> AdWords communities (6 languages) also just moved to a 3rd party platform:

That’s an SEO play. Adwords is tired of all the trash talked about them in their forum ranking so highly because it is hosted on a Google Domain.

[quinc...@gmail.com]

[R kamalakkannan]

what is sq125?

it is how to convert user understand format ?

[j]

-1 for moving to stackoverflow. Why do we need another site? I have been using Google groups for years, no issues so far. What do we get by moving to stakoverflow? Does it work on Android tablet or something else that we need to know that is so special about it?

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[Daniel Florey]

Too late

[Geoffrey Spear]

On Saturday, March 9, 2013 12:50:05 AM UTC-5, Chuck Ocheret wrote:

This would be fine with me if someone from Google would actually answer our questions on Stack Overflow. ;-)

To be fair, even before the change, the majority of answers to technical questions on the appengine-python list weren't from Google employees anyway (I don't know about the Java list.) 

[payala]

This would be fine if someone answered questions, I find appengine related questions on stackoverflow have a pretty high chance to go unanswered if they are not dead-simple.

[Rafael]

aside from going unanswered, there's no way to query about generalized system status, which happens quite often.

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[Hooman Korasani]

-1
Stackoverflow has a very strict FAQ rules, and questions are easily closed.  I don't think it is a good idea to move support to that platform.

[Moises Belchin]

I'm not a big fan of SO.

Saludos.

Moisés Belchín.

2013/6/25 Hooman Korasani <hou...@venuscloud.com>

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[aswath satrasala]

-1 for SO.

-Aswath

[Jeff Schnitzer]

-1 for reviving a 1.5-year-old thread.

Jeff

[PK]

Agree...

PK

www.gae123.com

On June 26, 2013 at 7:35:05 AM, Jeff Schnitzer (je...@infohazard.org) wrote:

-1 for reviving a 1.5-year-old thread.

Jeff

[rcp]

-1 from an 'enthusiast programmer'; SO considers me un-washed despite my relentless effort to be concise and precise.

[Kaan Soral]

S.O. is a great source for clear solutions - mostly from google hits
However as you mentioned they seriously have some issues, definitely not a great place for support, I also hate asking a question and explaining the reasons to a bunch of religious programmers (religious as in illogically fanatical about ideals of something)
Mostly a good place for 2+2=? type of questions

[Aayush Anand]

hi.. I am an aspirant of GSOC '14.
I did register as student and submitted my proposal. But yesterday when i tried to login, I found that my access is suspended only to GSOC. I was redirected to the page saying "If you've been redirected to this page from a particular product, it means that your access to this product has been suspended." 
(https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40039?p=ah)

i talked with google voice at GSOC forum and then from Melange developers. Melange developers informed me that Melange uses App Engine for user authentication and management and so asked me to check if i can log in to it or not.
when i tried to log in to it, i faced the same problem. so they hypothesize that even when i visit google-melange.com i am getting blocked by App Engine before App Engine even passes my request to Melange.

please see to this.. i have really worked so hard for it. my all hard work will go in vain if my account is not restored within few hours. please help me out. student registration will end in 10 hours.

i would also like to share the incident from when i am facing this issue.
actually my GSOC profile was open and was left static in a tab. so that if i get any reply on my proposal, i can respond to it asap
at the same time i was working to fix a bug for the organisation for whom i would like to work, on other tabs. This bug was relate to indifferent behavior on session out. to recreate that bug i was deleting the cookies again and again. after some time when i went back to my GSOC page and refereshed it, i was redirected to that page saying "my access is suspended". and from then i am facing this problem.

Melange-developers hypothesized that App Engine has somehow mistaken the cookie-clearing behavior as i have described as possibly nefarious and spammy and put a block on me.

please remove my block.. you can bug-fix this issue later but please remove my block first.. i don't have time. student registration will end in few hours.

i am posting it here to get your attention.

[Vinny P]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 3:31 AM, Aayush Anand <aayus...@gmail.com> wrote:

hi.. I am an aspirant of GSOC '14.
I did register as student and submitted my proposal. But yesterday when i tried to login, I found that my access is suspended only to GSOC. I was redirected to the page saying "If you've been redirected to this page from a particular product, it means that your access to this product has been suspended." 
(https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40039?p=ah

)

i talked with google voice at GSOC forum and then from Melange developers. Melange developers informed me that Melange uses App Engine for user authentication and management 

at the same time i was working to fix a bug for the organisation for whom i would like to work, on other tabs. This bug was relate to indifferent behavior on session out. to recreate that bug i was deleting the cookies again and again. after some time when i went back to my GSOC page and refereshed it, i was redirected to that page saying "my access is suspended". and from then i am facing this problem.

Considering that the Google Summer of Code deadline has already passed, the following advice is probably too little too late. 

If anyone else finds themselves in the same predicament though, the better option would be to edit the cookies directly using a cookie manager (depending on your browser, you can download different plugins for this) instead of repeatedly deleting them. That way, you can set up a predictable testing environment and rule out possible confounding factors. If you still run into the automated block problem, try re-accessing the page from a computer with a different IP address (and preferably from an entirely different network). 

 

-----------------

-Vinny P

Technology & Media Advisor

Chicago, IL

App Engine Code Samples: http://www.learntogoogleit.com

[Clark Van Oyen]

I'm not having a lot of luck getting a response on SO, since apparently not all App Engine discussions are related to "programming"...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28285552/being-flooded-with-traffic-and-the-remote-ip-reported-in-app-engine-logs-as-sta?noredirect=1#comment44925358_28285552

[Alex Martelli]

Hi Clark,

right -- *some* questions are system administration, so my plan (and I'm pushing as hard as I can to make this happen soon!) is to use tag google-cloud-platform on ServerFault for sysadm Qs (whether on GAE or any other parts of GCP).  I just recently (<2 months, inc. holidays &c) switched jobs within Google to "1:many tech support for cloud", and so far I've been "drinking from the firehose" listening and learning more than _doing_, but, the "bias for action" is taking over:-), but, I hope to make this happen ASAP (the great things about priorities is that you can always juggle them around to justify spending your time on what you think needs to be done *right now*...!-).

Thanks,

Alex

[Clark Van Oyen]

Great idea! Agreed, on it being a great thing that we can recursively define priorities within an established set of priorities in order to arrive at one deterministic path :) Best of luck in your new job!

[Alex Martelli]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 6:24 PM, Clark Van Oyen <cl...@countable.ca> wrote:

Great idea! Agreed, on it being a great thing that we can recursively define priorities within an established set of priorities in order to arrive at one deterministic path :) Best of luck in your new job!

I believe the proper wording is "break a leg" (I don't have any theatrical background myself, but 2nd-hand that's how I heard it:-).

Alex 

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[Official George]

I want for real

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[Alex Martelli]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 5:23 AM, Official George <swaggy...@gmail.com> wrote:

I want for real

Sorry, it's opaque to me what you mean by that.  Elucidate please?

Alex

 

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