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0 pointschimprich7y ago0 comments

That is pretty much the reason for Stack Overflow's existence isn't it? Requests for debugging whatever problem you have (for free), and offers to do the same for others. You make it sound like a bad thing.

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everfree7y ago· 1 in thread

Stack Overflow is about creating a wiki of knowledge for future visitors. If you have a question that is only relevant to your specific implementation, and that will never help anyone else in the future, then it doesn't add value to Stack Overflow.

chimprichOP7y ago

It's sometimes hard to know in advance whether your situation is unique or going to be of use to someone in the future however.

If it is completely unique and is of no use to anyone else, then it still of use to one person and still worth answering. Maybe SO just needs a flag for questions as 'unique situation' so it doesn't appear by default in future searches.

Also, SO isn't really a wiki. It's not designed that way. It's built around "this is my problem; what is the best solution?" interactions.

hashhar7y ago

This is the biggest reason why people fault Stack Overflow. As Joel and Jeff have always said, it's about making a repository of knowledge to questions that are helpful for everyone. So you still see questions which are about "I was trying this but get this error" since they are useful when the error is something general and a lot of people might run into.

OTOH questions like I am trying to do this very specific thing that interacts with multitudes of other systems and cannot get it to work are therefore not considered StackOverflow worthy.

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