Why the Flex Coders Yahoo! Group Should Be Replaced by StackoverFlow.com
The Yahoo! Flex Coders mailing list group is really good at connecting developers with important people in the know at Adobe to get help with the strange bugs they’re having while developing applications with Adobe Flex.
However, Yahoo! Groups is such an unfortunate and antiquated technology to use for developers asking and answering questions. Sure, it’s great if you like communication in a 1995-email-list-serv sort of way.
However, it doesn’t have to be this painful. By using StackOverflow.Com, all your developer Q&A pains are solved.
Stackoverflow offers:
1) Better long term archivability of question and answers, all nicely rated and richly formatted. On the Yahoo! groups, you get a string of old emails, including usually the original question again, all in a nasty string-formatted email archive that you have to dig through. Don’t believe me, this is usually what a thread message looks like.
2) StackOverflow allows formatting source code so it is readable by both the questioners, the answerers, and those in the future trying to decipher both. Try maintaining your source code formatting when sending through an email, or worse, using Yahoo!’s poor website UI for posting to the Group. And if you’re generous enough to answer someone’s questions, why complicate by having to deciphering the poor formatting? Or, if you’re fortunate enough to view the archive through one of the many spiders that you find via Google, it might look like this. Ick.
3) Adding images and screen shots that are managed in the flow of your question. This allows for captioning of images, etc.. Take a look at my latest question’s nice formatting (or, look at the answer to this question, with nice source code, inline, with ability to leave well formatted comments around it). Try doing that in the Yahoo! interface.
4) Searching by keywords and tags. Want just see what’s happening for “Flex”, just search on the Flex tag, which BTW, gets a nice “Adobe” icon next to it, letting you know that’s the Flex tag isn’t related to something else.
5) Sometimes your question isn’t exactly a Flex question. Maybe it falls more into the realm of “Flash”, or “Actionscript” or “AIR”. So the answer might be more pertinent to a larger audience than initially thought. It’s important to think of the larger audience for your questions, as someone down the road might have a similar issue as you and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t easily find the answer to your question, as it might keep them from asking the same question again.
I could keep listing more, but I don’t think I need to. I wish the Adobe gurus like Alex Harui (@aharui) would let the Flex Coders depreciate, and have everyone move on. (Sorry to only name Alex, as there’s lots of good people there answering questions) And btw, I fully visit Flex Coders because I know that some of the Adobe people actually take a lot of time to answer questions there. (I’m also sure they have a valid reason for maintaining the Flex Coders list.)
StackOverflow.com has a perfectly viable Adobe user base answering all sorts of questions, today, right now. However, this suggestion is still based on the fact that I have to go use the Flex Coders group at Yahoo for the really tricky things that no one else can fix.
So get started today by viewing the Stackoverflow.com’s Flex questions (and answers).
Comments
Comment from Joeflash
Date: April 7, 2010, 2:17 pm
I see where you’re coming from Todd, but from my perspective… when I’m onsite at a clients, or my sketchy wireless connection goes, I’m suddenly offline, and I need the answer to an esoteric Flex problem.. chances are someone out there has already encountered it. And it is really great — nay, a live saver — to have my own private, offline database of 5 years’ worth of Flexocder threads to search through. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
And, call me old-fashioned, but I don’t give a toss about colour-coding or even formatting… so long as I don’t have t open a dozen attachments to find out if the thread I’m looking at has the solution I’m looking for. So in many cases, simpler is better. And I hate discussion list attachments, like many hard-core programmers hate FLAs.
I guess this comes from a realization of late that, although the Cloud is a wonderful thing, what happens if your client’s onsite IT department blocks Firefox, or most blogs? Or an earthquake hits California and half the cloud shuts down for a day? Or your ISP switches you to a dynamic IP that happens to be on every block list, because your neighbour is a script kiddie or just simply clueless enough not to secure their ‘puter from trojans? The list could go on.
You’re buggered if you do not have a backup plan.
But now that you mention it, StackOverflow is a great resource. I think I’ll configure Thunderbird to pull in and offline archive the RSS feeds… so I can have my own offline StackOverflow database… :)
Comment from todd
Date: April 7, 2010, 2:32 pm
Interesting point. I didn’t actually know anyone who actually subscribed and kept all those emails on their own machines! But, based on the point you make, shouldn’t you just download the entire Internet to your laptop?
Comment from Joeflash
Date: April 7, 2010, 3:17 pm
I tried that, didn’t work http://tweetphoto.com/17539191
Comment from Amy Blankenship
Date: April 7, 2010, 4:04 pm
I think it’s unfortunate Adobe killed NNTP when they suddenly started supporting their own forums (which is where most of the activity that used to be on FlexCoders is now). NNTP made it very easy and quick to participate in forums and to see what forums needed your attention. Google Groups provided quick and easy searchability of anything on usenet, but could easily be narrowed to just one group or several groups.
But I think that the big problem of quoting the original message over and over is due to the persistent rudeness of the participants, most of whom refuse to ever trim their messages. This is reinforced and encouraged by the fact that the Adobe employees who frequent the list mostly exemplify this terrible behavior.
If the Adobe engineers stop supporting FlexCoders, which I think would be a shame, they will likely not go to StackOverFlow. Instead, they will concentrate even more on their own forums, which you apparently don’t regard as usable even a little (or possibly not discoverable). And there’s the issue of the people who are not Adobe engineers who won’t use those forums because of their clunkiness.
BTW, I do occasionally need to search the several years’ worth of archive of FlexCoders that I maintain on my laptop.
Comment from Todd
Date: April 8, 2010, 9:51 am
@Joeflash — that’s funny.
@Amy — all true. I think I remember Adobe switching their forums 1.5 years ago, or something. I haven’t really spent much time in the new era over there, except in the Cairngorm one.
Comment from Luis B
Date: April 10, 2010, 4:12 pm
@Todd: I agree. I love using stackoverflow for Flex questions and more. I rarely use FlexCoders because Google usually points my queries to stackoverflow. I think stackoverflow is optimized for Google queries.
Comment from elliot
Date: September 5, 2010, 6:07 am
hi guys… i solved this issue by creating flexcodersforum.com
please help to spread the word around …. we are giving away a new ipod touch for the 1000th post
Comment from Todd
Date: September 7, 2010, 8:36 am
That’s nice an all, but we don’t need another antiquated Forum that’s hosted by individuals. People have created their own flash-based stack overflow sites, etc…there’s no need.
BTW, I haven’t visited Flex Coders in about 4 months now.
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