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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on Asking and answering FAQ style questions

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Asking and answering FAQ style questions

+7
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After spending my time on SO, I found that some of the FAQ style questions were VERY helpful, especially with things such as SQL injection in PHP/MySQL (for example How can I prevent SQL injection in PHP?)

Are we open to the same kind of thing here?
These could be refer-back-to-canonical type questions to use as dupe targets etc.

I guess what I'm asking; do we want to see these?

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As other answers have said, we have some of these, they're helpful, and they can be hard to write. On Codidact there's another option, should the community want to enable it: articles.

An article is another type of top-level post. They're being used in a few different ways around the network: longer-form papers on EE, resources on Languages & Linguistics, blog on Meta, and a couple others.

In all of these examples, the articles are in a separate category that contains only articles. Search is global, so they'll still be found when someone searches on Q&A. It is also possible to mingle Q&A and articles in the same category; our developer collab community does this. The advantage is that all the content is together; the disadvantage is that when you start a post, you first have to choose a type, which is a non-trivial barrier to a newcomer with a question. (Someday we might be able to make that smoother, but probably not soon.) My personal advice at this time would be to use a different category; take a look at the examples I mentioned for ideas on what that could look like, and I'm happy to work with y'all to do what's best for this community. You're the experts on what that is; I'm here to provide some capabilities if I can.

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Yes, articles! (2 comments)
Yes, articles!
hkotsubo‭ wrote about 2 years ago · edited about 2 years ago

IMO, enabling articles would be great. Sometimes you just want to write a post explaining "what is X and what it's used for". And for those cases, the question tends to be very silly ("I've heard of X, but what is it?).

An article could simply skip this "made up a question" part and go straight to the point.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 2 years ago

Right, articles are intended for jumping straight to "I have information to share", for cases where it doesn't work as well to use an answer (question doesn't exist, question would be too broad, whatever).