Integrating Discourse and Stackoverflow?

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Hi,
We are considering using Discourse for our open source developer community, to facilitate discussion.
Another option considered, and seen by some as the preferred option, is to simply rely on Questions on StackOverflow, and drive our community there.

I am wondering if there are ways to integrate both, to somehow let both doors open. For instance, triggering automatically a discussion in Discourse when a new question is posted in SO about our technology.

Any body has achieve some sort of integration between Discoure and StackOverflow?

Thanks,
Roland

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No such integration makes sense; Stack Overflow is focused Q&A – discussion is explicitly disallowed. I would just stick with Stack Overflow, with the caveat that Stack Overflow has rules about this sort of thing.

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Thanks Jeff.
Borders between answerable questions and discussions are not always super clear to me.
Agreed that a discussion would not fit in Stack Overflow, but could imagine a Q&A in SO generating a discussion in Discourse. In any case this can totally be done manually, if we decide to use both, we might not need integration then.

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If it can have 10+ “answers”, it is not a question, but a discussion.

More info in this video Learning Vs. Discussion by Jeff Atwood [Video]

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I’m wondering. Has Stack Overflow ever considered merging Discourse and Stack Overflow together? For https://github.com/mui/material-ui:

  • Stack Overflow isn’t that great for us because of the admin rights. It takes months for our team to get the reputation they need to properly provide support on the questions asked about our open source project.
  • Discourse isn’t that great for us because they are discussions, things that tend to be mostly unproductive (abused, people are mostly using it for questions, bug reports, feature requests, RFC, all of which we use a different tool for, e.g. GitHub).
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These days we have an official Q&A plugin, see: Discourse Question Answer

That said reading your description this is not a software problem you are facing. It sounds like you have a non cohesive community problem … too many avenues for not enough people.

For very small communities just leaning on GitHub for everything may be all you need, Discourse certainly gives you more features, but all the features in the world are not going to fix a people problem.

Discourse could work for you if you keep bugs/features/questions all in one roof, but if people need to read a manual to figure out where each category lives then it can be very problematic.

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Thanks for the link toward the Discourse Question Answer. It might be exactly what we are missing to try Discourse!

Regarding building a more cohesive community, interesting, we will look into this. As of now, MUI, as an open-source project has about 1M unique developers on the documentation a month. Bootstrap CSS has around x2.5 more developers. We guide the community like this:

  • Basic Q&A: Stack Overflow, about 18k questions: Stack Overflow Trends
  • Bug reports: GitHub issues: about 2.4k bugs: https:/ /github.com/mui/material-ui/issues?q=is%3Aissue+label%3A%22bug+%F0%9F%90%9B%22+
  • Feature requests: GitHub issues: about 1.1k feature requests: “https:/ /github.com/mui/material-ui/issues?q=label%3A%22new+feature%22+is%3Aissue”
  • Discussions, e.g. RFCs: GitHub issues: about 600 discussions: "https:/ /github.com/mui/material-ui/issues?q=is%3Aissue+label%3Adiscussion+
  • A bunch of stuff that is not clearly categorized in GitHub issues, 13k more, maybe a mix of the above: “https:/ /github.com/mui/material-ui/issues?q=is%3Aissue±label%3A%22bug+%F0%9F%90%9B%22±label%3A%22new+feature%22±label%3Adiscussion+.”
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