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.
Asking and answering FAQ style questions
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?
3 answers
You are accessing this answer with a direct link, so it's being shown above all other answers regardless of its score. You can return to the normal view.
Yes it is fine and probably encouraged even. I have written several self-answered Q&A here and they were mostly well-received. They aren't all that easy to write though, especially getting the question right and meaningful, so that people looking for that same problem can find it - or at least so that other users looking for a duplicate target or FAQ post can find it.
Ideally (if applicable) the question should contain some code examples and then the answer can refer to those. And obviously use sources and references in your answers when possible, the usual drill for writing a good answer.
0 comment threads
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.
Adding my own 2 pence here;
I would very much like to see these kinds of Q&A
These would be better if they could be attributed to community effort (garnering no reward for any persons who choses to contribute)
I would be quite happy to start a couple of these (not enough experience to be confident in giving all the answers, so help pls :P ), again using the SQL Injection as well as adding common errors (Unexpected T_STRING for example)
0 comment threads
0 comment threads