On Nov 4, 2014, at 1:33 PM, Mark Pernotto wrote:

> I think all of this is really useful. I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a
> lot of great ideas and results from StackOverflow.
> 
> However, I've been burned quite a bit as well - deprecated code, inaccurate
> results, or just the wrong answer gets accepted. There seems to be such a
> push to 'accept as answer' that no one gives a second thought to
> alternative solutions. Because one size doesn't fit all - I think we all
> know that.

I hate it when I answer something 15-20 min after someone posts a
question, and they flag it as the 'correct' answer.  Someone else
might have some better response. *

I made the mistake of accepting an answer without fully testing it:

	http://dba.stackexchange.com/q/30/51

Notice how no one else gave an alternative, as it works ... but I just
added the comment that the performance was much, much worse than when
I started.



... and we run into issues where what might have once been the correct
answer no longer is (because there's a new, better alternative, or
because some tool's no longer available (or not recommended because
of a horrible security flaw).


> I guess I'm trying to advocate not to rely on this type of resource
> completely when resolving your coding challenges.  While it can certainly
> be a tremendous learning tool, keep an objective mind for what tool best
> fits your institution's purpose.

What I'd like to see is some place where we can have the summary
of recommended practices for various problems ... lots of people
can contribute, and it can kept up-to-date.  Basically, a crowd
sourced FAQ.  The problem is, you can't just set up a wiki and
expect people to contribute.

Say what you will about StackExchange's herd-mentality about the
'right type of questions'**, their system gets people to contribute.



* for the people who complain about the grubbing for reputation:
  it's gamification.  I just hate the people who can manage to pop
  out reasonable sounding responses 10 min after the question was
  asked that are clearly just internet research because I *know*
  the answer is wrong. ... one person on Seasoned Advice was gaming
  the system; if you started downvoting their questions, they'd
  just delete them, but they were getting almost all of upvotes
  due to their 'early and plausible' strategy.

** Yet, I still have the 4th-rated question on Seasoned Advice
  for "Translating cooking terms between US / UK / AU / CA / NZ"
  ( http://cooking.stackexchange.com/q/784/67 ), simply because
  I got it in back when 'community wiki' was considered an option.
  Lots of other interesting questions have gotten closed as their
  community cracked down on 'em, though.  (eg, cookbook
  recommendations)


-Joe

ps.  Nothing frustrates me more than scouring the internet due to a
     problem you've run into ... and you *finally* find a 2 year old
     post on some forum that is the *exact* symptoms you have ... and
     you scroll through all of the replies of things you've already
     tried ... and get to the last post, from the person with the
     problem and they've posted 'nevermind, I fixed it'.