differentiation between "ask" and "talk"

[garrett]

With regard to #29 & #30:

How do we message the difference between the "ask" and "talk" sites?

In most people's minds, having two is quite redundant. People can (and often do) ask and answer stuff in a forum.

It is super-important to get this messaged correctly, else people will wind up in the wrong place and will be confused (and the resulting site will be full of the wrong type of conversation if this is a common occurance).

---

attn: @dneary @johnmark

[mscherer]

Good point. in fact, shouldn't we start to us talk right now for the technical discussion around the project ( like the infrastructure discussion ) so we know how to use the platform now rather than later ( and so the site is not empty on launch ? )

[dneary]

My original proposal was that we use mailing lists for developer discussion, and "ask" for Q&A. I do feel we need a place where people "talk" and have discussion, debate, etc. But I also agree that these 2 very similar services are confusing.

One framing is to have Talk be our "forum" and Ask be our "knowledge base" (archive of FAQs and answers) (segmenting by browse behaviour).

Another framing would be to use Discourse for discussions and developer chat, and Ask for user questions & answers (segment by user type).

The latter will be better for visitors, I think.

[Fryguy]

I'm actually surprised we have discourse at all. When I had spoken to @johnmark about a month back I thought that ask could handle "everything", such that we didn't need discourse. We had a similar confusion concern at the time, and I leaned more toward the Q&A style forum because it's more approachable...i.e. whenever I Google something, I love when stackoverflow/stackexchange has the answer, and shudder when I think I have to wade through a forum.

[dneary]

I was of the opinion that we needed a place focussed on people &
relationships, and not just on Q&A. I would have preferred mailing
lists, but Discourse is a 2nd choice. The positioning is Discourse =
developer forum, Q&A = user questions. I think it'll be clear enough.

One of the first questions someone will ask is "where's the mailing
list", by the way :-)

Dave.

On 05/23/2014 02:20 PM, Jason Frey wrote:

I'm actually surprised we have discourse at all. When I had spoken to
@johnmark https://github.com/johnmark about a month back I thought
that ask could handle "everything", such that we didn't need discourse.
We had a similar confusion concern at the time, and I leaned more toward
the Q&A style forum because it's more approachable...i.e. whenever I
Google something, I love when stackoverflow/stackexchange has the
answer, and shudder when I think I have to wade through a forum.

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[chessbyte]

@dneary We can always add a mailing list later, if needed. Not everything has to be decided day 1.

[johnmark]

@Fryguy that is my opinion, but I'm happy to wait and see how things shake out. We will try both discourse and askbot and see how it works.

[Fryguy]

@johnmark @dneary Sounds good.

[dneary]

I think this issue is resolved (any future updates/discussion can happen in issue #51).