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Re: Stack Overflow versus the Cygwin mailing lists (Was: prefork error : couldn't create pipe process trackerWin32 error 161)


On 4/29/2013 11:26, Christopher Faylor wrote:

the "I'm looking for
my keys here because the light is better" type of mentality to be very
counterproductive.

More like, "I'm looking for my keys on this street because there are bullies on the next street over."

Bullies on SO get downvoted to oblivion or deleted.

The net is full of bad and outdated advice about Cygwin.

Stack Overflow gives you the tools to fix that. Post comments, post better answers, edit incorrect answers, downvote bad answers, vote to delete unhelpful answers, and gain reputation to get moderator fu.

Mailing lists give you only some of those abilities, and the powers that do exist are weaker here:

- Post comments and better answers: Threads go stale and future seekers have poor tools for judging the quality of the answers. If someone tries replying to an old post to fix it, they generally get yelled at here. So, you end up with multiple threads on a topic over time, each possibly containing the correct answer at the time, each increasingly outdated as a function of post date.

- Edit incorrect answers: nope.

- Downvote bad answers: nope.

- Delete unhelpful answers: only in the same sense that spam gets taken out of the archives.

- Gain reputation: kind of, but I imagine it takes a month or three of lurking here to figure out who the major players are, what their competencies are, etc. I can do that on SO with a few clicks.

- Moderator fu: Post deletion and unsubsription are limited to a select few, leaving only yelling and persuasion as "moderating" tactics. Yelling is a poor tool, and persuasion sucks up a lot of time. (As when I write this.)

I can't find a "Chris Faylor" on SO, and the four users with "CGF" in their name all have 0 rep. So, if you don't want to engage with that world, point me at some bad posts and I'll see about dealing with them. I have over 10k rep there, so I have nearly full moderator privileges. And if you don't like one of *my* answers, tell me why here, or in a comment there, and I'll either fix it myself or consider your edit.

It does you no good to write off a vibrant alternative community. You can't scorn it away, and ignoring it isn't going to fix anything.

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