Re: Use of Stackoverflow for Question/Answer forum

[Ted Lemon]

On Dec 22, 2014, at 4:26 PM, Garrett Fitzgerald <address@hidden> wrote:
> It's actually been discussed on meta - consensus is that people should 
> actually come over here for help. :-)

Yeah, so, this is intensely frustrating for anybody who tries to google for 
help with lilypond, because there are several dozen archives of the lilypond 
mailing list, each slightly different, so that if you do virtually any google 
search for help with lilypond, it returns a page with about a dozen identical 
copies of the same wrong answer, a couple of random document pages for 
different versions of the document that don't tell you what you need to know, 
and nothing whatsoever useful.

So essentially, when you give this as the answer to the question "why not use 
stack overflow," what you are really saying is "don't google for help with 
Lilypond.   Instead, just ask your question."

That's sort of a reasonable thing to say: whenever I ask a question on the 
mailing list, some helpful person (or likely two) come back with an answer.   
But this isn't an answer that scales: if lilypond were to get more popular, at 
some point this would no longer work, and it seems to me that the difficulty of 
getting answers out of google is an impediment to lilypond's popularity.

It just astonishes me that when I google for something like "how to shrink a 
staff in lilypond" I can't find any useful answer (although I find dozens of 
copies of the same utterly absurd answer: just shrink the notes, but keep the 
staff the same size!), and I think part of that is the way lilypond questions 
are asked and answered.