@mousetail Did anyone check whether their site would accept the example questions from this proposal?

@Mast @D.W., a mod on CS.SE, outlines what would be on topic here: cs.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1844/136468

Yea, but did anyone go through a couple of questions from the Area51 list to check whether it would work?

Um I don't think so

If D.W. thinks it can work and the people behind the proposal think it can work, it's going to cut a long conversation short. Allows you to skip (private) beta.

But it would be important to check whether it would actually work first.

@RydwolfPrograms ^

I believe having this as its own site is a better option

It gives us more control over the scope, which I think would be larger than what is on-topic on CS

Scopes can change.

Although we could always change the scope of CS to fit these sorts of questions, I feel like it makes more sense to have it as its own site

(partially ninja'd :p)

Keeping a site alive for 10 years is hard. Being part of a bigger site does have advantages.

We also still haven't resolved whether questions about actual code would be on-topic, Game Dev style, and those definitely wouldn't be on-topic for CS

Again, scopes can change.

They can, but I don't think that would make sense within the CS's overall scope

I'm not saying they'll bend them far enough in your favour, but say they'd be willing to talk about it. Would you be willing to or can the idea be dismissed out of hand?

I guess we can bring it up in the Discussion Zone

I personally wouldn't be opposed to a merge with CS

Personally I'd rather it be its own site for a variety of reasons (some of which rather selfish :p), but there's no harm in discussing things, and my personal opinion doesn't matter much

It would be amazing if we could skip all this commitment and private beta stuff

Yea for personal reasons I'd like it to be a new site just so I can for a short time be one of the top N people of some site

Raphael has been an appointed mod on CS.SE since '12. He knows a couple of things.

Both of these would need to have special exceptions if we were to move to CS without reducing our scope

That's why you'd talk first and merge later, not the other way around.

It would be a very important talk.

I just feel like we'd be compromising too much. Either our scope would need to be reduced significantly, or CS's would need to have lots of weird exceptions

^

I personally think if we move to allow programming questions like GD does, we'd have plenty of material to be an independent site

I don't think CS.SE would want questions about, eg., improving the readability of a programming language on their site.

@mathcat Did you ask them?

Well, no, but I don't think they want an overlap with CR.

Would be nice if there was a representative from CS here for this dicussion

I feel like our current overlap with CS is smaller than it looks. While it'd certainly be (theoretically) possible to stretch CS's scope to fit us, having CGCC as my home site, I'm a little wary of that sort of thing

@mathcat We review code, not languages :-)

Good point.

Yeah I think our CR overlap is pretty small

Surviving beta is hard work. Keeping a site alive after a few years is still hard work. Splintering communities within SE is becoming a bit of a problem, but technically not your problem so may not be of interest (yet). There's a moderator who more or less invited you to talk about getting room on their site. You can talk, or not talk. Maybe they still want to talk after beta didn't work out, who knows.

A talk and a few meta posts can go over a lot faster than getting enough committers, I can tell you that.

You can still get your own chatrooms and whatnot, they're still free.

Having sub-communities within a community isn't new.

Or we could invite them to this room :p

I'm definitely open to actually talking to the CS mods about this, yeah

Maybe one option could be us doing our best in private beta, and if things end up not going well then we could fall back to a space on CS

(and for transparency, here's my selfish reasons for wanting PLDI to be its own site: 1. I wanna be part of something big like making a new site, 2. I'm aiming to be a moderator, and PLDI would be a great opportunity for that)

Plus given how much work we've put in, the advertising Lyxal's done, the endless reshuffling and waiting, there's kinda some sunk cost :p

@RydwolfPrograms If you need a bit to talk this over with the core contributors, that's ok too. You'd be deciding for a lot of people, not just yourself.

@RydwolfPrograms lol same

Oh well yeah it's not my decision

I just happen to be in chat right now to discuss it :p

@Seggan That's what D.W. checked. To phrase my question more clearly, did anyone from this group check?

@RydwolfPrograms this

@Mast idk whats on topic for CS so i cant check

radvylf did a rudimentary check in a meta a51 answer

@Seggan As D.W., the main pitfall I see is with open-ended questions. Those rarely do well on SE. CG&CC and CR are a bit odd in that regard.

Puzzling too.

It can be done, but you'd have to be very clear about what goes and what doesn't.

Worldbuilding? UX?

those have pretty open ended questions

That's the spirit :-)

?

@Mast True, I'm quite sure questions like "What is a generational garbage collector and what are its benefits?" wouldn't be on-topic on CS.

See what works for those sites. Can you work with something similar?

@Seggan This seems like a terrible question to begin with

agree

@mousetail Semicolons are terrible. Fullstop.

@Mast sorry, i dont see what you mean?

@Mast closed right then and there :P

I once destroyed a database because the data contained semi-colons. Guess what the CSV used...

@mathcat Wouldn't it be? I think it could be

Maybe rephrased a little

/summon cs_mod

@Seggan Opinion based, open ended questions. Look at how those sites deal with it.

While still being an SE site.

@mousetail I'm not familiar with CS' standards.

@Mast Yea, statements should end with a full stop like english

However, I am sceptical that open questions could only survive the first years of the beta phase.

@Mast they mostly require evidence and somewhat objectivity (at least WB and what I can see from UX)

@mathcat e.g. you don't come across trivial python questions in SO these days.

@mathcat You very much do

@Seggan I'd recommend that for PLDI as well, objectivity. Why are semicolons bad? Why would this approach be a bad idea? Why is a generational garbage collector a good idea for some languages while not for others?

you do? The majority I've seen were closed shortly afterwards

Not necessarily as requirement for the question, but perhaps in the answer. You'll figure it out, eventually.

99% do, but a few stay open and since SO gets such a huge volume of questions the 1% is still a lot

@Mast yeah i agree

On Code Review, a requirement for answers is that the answer contains an insightful observation of sorts about the approach/code in the question.

Otherwise it's not a review.

thats what i assumes wed have to do

We didn't have that rule when we started. We learned.

Too many 'try this' answers, SO style.

Useless for everyone.

"I'd do it this way instead", without justification. Not helpful either.

Not a review.

Unless it's so obvious anyone can tell why it's better, but even then. There's a bit of a grey area there, admittedly.

because "just because i dont like semicolons" or "so-and-so said so" is not an answer

@Seggan Exactly.

And that's the difference between a Reddit discussion and SE-style Q&A.

^

thats partly why were making this site

@Mast lmao that'd be a great title for a tom scott video

Another example of a scope change that was quite impactful: song identification questions were on-topic on Music Fans in 2015, outlawed in 2021.

They had quite a process about it.

wait Music Fans is a thing

If you go the route of a beta, you'll need a How to answer page.

Look at those from the open-ended sites you know, get a feel for it.

:thumbsup:

@Seggan For the past 7-8 years or so, yea.

you have helped us much, thank you

No problem.

I've seen many beta sites fail. It's never pretty and I hope y'all make it. One way or another.

Being a sub-community of a larger site is no punishment.

i didnt think it was :P

the most fitting subcommunity we have is on CGCC

but we dont really fit wanywhere

lang dev is arguably no better suited to cg&cc scope-wise than it is to cr

which is basically why we're doing a site proposal despite a "sub-community" already existing around it :P

in other news,

ninja'd

Odd, it says 70 for me. With the same 141.

huh, same

59 to go, of which 13 with experience (200+ rep anywhere) on SE.

Saturday you had 73 to go.

So at this speed it's going to take at least another 4 weeks.

Probably more.

70 for me too

shouldiblamecaching.com

@Mast That's what we're going for with "advantages/disadvantages"

That's more objective than the initial form of most of those questions..."should I do ..."