Discussion Forum

Hello everyone !

I have been participating on this forum for a few weeks and I came to the conclusion that this community could really enjoy the use of a StackExchange website. This thread is an attempt to get your impressions about going in that direction.

Important disclaimer: I am not affiliated in any way to StackExchange.com. This is not an attempt to promote a business.

A few observations

1. Almost every single thread of this forum is about problem solving: they are a good fit to the Q&A format.
2. This forum has a small basis of fairly active users that answer most questions, many but not all being COMSOL employees.
3. the forum contains a lot of very useful information but ...
4. ... we have many duplicates, which have the same visibility as "original" questions
5. ... many questions simply do not provide enough information for an helpful discussion
6. ... arguably as a result of (4) and (5), most questions go unanswered
7. ... the tag system is largely ignored

How would we benefit from a StackExchange website?

The most prominent and useful feature of StackExchange is its community driven moderation tools. Duplicates can be marked as such and closed, along with irrevelant / unanswerable questions.

Answers can be upvoted or downvoted so that a canonical one emerges, serving as a reference. On the other hand, it keeps up with new versions of the software as outdated answers will get downvoted, in favor of fresh ones. Votes also make the most useful questions more visible.

Equally important is the possibility for users to suggest edits of other people posts. This distributes the effort of producing valuable questions, as anyone can improve an answer, but also a question: correcting typos, clarifying intent, adding LaTeX markup, or adding tags which will make future searchs easier to everyone.

Anecdotically, the user experience would benefit from a few gadgets that were developped for StackOverflow: syntax highlighting, comments, user profiles, more extensive LaTeX support, instant "chat" section, ...

What would it take?

StackExchange has a dedicated staging zone, Area51, for suggesting new communities. In its early days, a proposal must demonstrate its potential by gathering at least five users and five questions. So the initial bar is very low. In the long run, a few regular users do have to get involved with moderation.

My questions to you

1. Do you agree with these observations? Would you say a StackExchange website would help?
2. If some of us start this, would you be interested in asking/answering questions there?
3. Would you be interested in helping with the moderation?
4. COMSOL employees: would you see that initiative as a non-welcome "competition" to this forum?

Best regards, Alexis Prel