Request for Computer Science Newsgroup support

[Larry Serflaten]

The Computer Science section has the 'Ask a Question' or 'Community Discussion' forum embedded in the website.  A nice feature for a small group of people, but insufficient for use by the masses.  A few of the major problems include:

 

1) Being the only intra-user communication service, it often has postings of a non-question nature (Look at this...,  Are you on?... etc)

2) Due to large amounts of traffic, postings seldom last longer than a few hours before being scrolled off the initial page.  Retrieving additional pages

    to go back a day or two is a very long process.

3) Without a comprehensive search function, there will inevitably be repeat questions from new students that will have already been answered many times.

 

A newsgroup's search capabilities provide a valuable resource for those learning to program.  Questions of the type, 'How do I make <something> happen?' are common while learning a new programming language and people who are likely to answer such questions get tired of seeing/answering the same questions over and over. (it seems to be human nature to get annoyed with FAQ's which may be why many sites provide access to their own FAQ pages) 

 

While starting a newsgroup devoted to the JavaScript programming environment at Khan Academy would be easy to do (I could do it), it really needs the support of the academy cadre with links to the newsgroup provided on the website.  Also note that if such an idea is acceptable, please discriminate between a newsgroup for JavaScript and a newsgroup for Python (or any other programming language planned to be supported by the academy), to avoid cross language confusion in discussions and searches. 

 

  

[Larry Serflaten]

Still thinking it would be useful, I've created the group myself.

 

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!forum/khan-academy-javascript-technical-qa