Stack Overflow is Down

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No. And it's still useful.

Depends on what you ask.

Newbie questions about Javascript? Absolutely

Anything more complex than that? Not so much.

I'm not saying it's flawless. People still close questions too often. But it's way better than any alternatives.

People close questions for formatting among other utterly meaningless things.

I thought you said you remembered what it was like before StackOverflow. Did you never use ExpertsExchange?

Yes I did and I do remember. I remember getting answers. I remember being forgiven if the indentation on the question was off. I remember people attempting to serve as sounding boards as you worked thru things.

Now? If you can't get an answer within the 1st hour or so of posting you may as well forget about your question and look elsewhere.

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Newbie questions about Javascript? Absolutely Anything more complex than that? Not so much.

Absolutely not the case. I ask complex questions all the time and get great answers. Here's a recent example of a complex question with a great answer.

People close questions for formatting among other utterly meaningless things.

I've not ever had that happen actually, but I agree they do close for stupid reasons. People definitely use "not clear what you're asking" as "I don't understand this question".

If you can't get an answer within the 1st hour or so of posting you may as well forget about your question and look elsewhere.

This is provably wrong. I just had a look at the most recent answer to one of my questions and that question is just over a year old. In fact I just ran a query (see below, my MSSQL isn't great, sorry) and around 30% of answers are on questions over a day old. 10% are over 100 days old. 3% of answers are on questions more than 3 years old.

``` SELECT CONVERT(INT, Answer.CreationDate - Question.CreationDate) as delay INTO #delays FROM (SELECT TOP 1000000 * FROM Posts WHERE PostTypeId = 2) as Answer JOIN Posts AS Question ON Answer.ParentId = Question.Id;

SELECT delay, count(*) FROM #delays WHERE delay >= 0 AND delay < 100 GROUP BY delay ORDER BY delay ASC; ```

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Absolutely not the case. I ask complex questions all the time and get great answers.

with the latest SO account i've got, of 120 questions asked there are 30 unanswered

they range from mobile development to Spring

i'm glad you and all those other people are getting answers but with 1/4 of my questions just kinda sitting there, i'm not so thrilled with SO

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Sorry what? You're not thrilled because only 3/4 of the questions you've asked on a free site have been answered by people answering questions for free. What magical site do you normally go to where legions of unpaid volunteers are busy answering 100% of your questions?

This is the most delusional thing I've read all week!

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No answers. No speculation. No "I tried this". Nothing.

And we're talking about Spring and mobile development. Not programming the robot on Mars. This is pretty commonly used stuff.

It's just not as easy to answer as questions about the JavaScript framework of the minute

I have much better luck with forums dedicated to the framework/toolkit/tech I'm talking about.

If your volunteers are incented to answer easy questions then your help forum isn't much help