Re: lua.stackexchange.com?

[Henning Diedrich <hd2010@...>]

Hi Luiz,

On Apr 27, 2013, at 9:29 PM, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:

> The only not so good point is that you need to visit the site to see the
> questions and answers.

That can be a good thing, though, since most people will probably as a starting point use a search engine to look for answers, i.e. start with the web.

That would usually land them at a Stack* site more likely than in the archives of lua-l because of Google site ranking. That's my anecdotical experience anyway. And newbies do not have a local lua-l email archive. 

Then with the ranking and election of 'best' answers, in my experience this is more useful than a mailing list.

And it encourages the right order of looking for help, searching first and posing a question only when answers are not online yet.

Great posts to the list will always be referenced (via web archive) in the Stack* answers, leading people to it as the next, deeper step of research.

On top of making it easier to find answers, I think it will increase the radius of Lua because newbies can be shy to ask at all at a mailing list. Troll newbies not withstanding. And searching and understanding a mailing list discussion is often not trivial before you have some knowledge of the topic in the first place.

For the mailing list, I think it could be ok to regard it somewhat as an IRC sometimes? Yes 2,000+ people are listening, and 7,000,000,000+ could look it up, but it can be ok to forget that and have a 'private' humorous exchange now and then?

Henning