DSpace developers encourage anyone to ask technical questions on StackOverflow using the "dspace" tag. StackOverflow is an excellent, free resource, and asking questions there gives us all the opportunity to hear answers from "experts" that are external to our DSpace community. |
You are still more than welcome to continue to ask technical questions about DSpace on mailing lists (specifically dspace-tech and dspace-devel), or using one of the other options listed in our Support Guide.
DSpace Developers have noticed that it can sometimes be difficult to determine the "best answer" to a question on mailing lists (or even in the mailing list archives). While you may get an answer to your question, you may not be able to tell if others agree that is the "best answer", or if it's just one of several possible answers. There are some questions that are asked frequently, which we'd all like to be able to "just Google". StackOverflow helps to solve both of these problems, as questions and answers appear prominently in Google search results, and it allows all users to "vote up" the best answer to a specific question.
In addition, StackOverflow has a massive community of developers and system administrators (other "experts"), who may be able to answer your question even better than someone on a DSpace mailing list can. As a basic example, suppose you encounter issues with running DSpace on Tomcat behind an Apache web server. If you asked your question on StackOverflow, you may also find Tomcat and Apache experts answering your question or offering suggestions!
For even more information take a look at the StackOverflow Tour: https://stackoverflow.com/tour
No. StackOverflow.com is oriented primarily towards developer-related or administrative-related questions. Questions that are subjective in nature are also discouraged, as it is very difficult (or impossible) to determine the "best answer".
Here are some examples of DSpace questions which you could ask on StackOverflow:
Here are some examples of DSpace questions that are probably NOT on-topic for StackOverflow (Instead these types of questions can just be asked on our mailing lists):
For more information on what is considered "on-topic" for StackOverflow see: https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic
It's easy! Though first, we do recommend searching (https://stackoverflow.com/search) to see if your question has already been asked before.
StackOverflow also welcomes answering your own questions if you discover the answer, or already knew it but wanted to make it easier to find the answer publicly: https://stackoverflow.com/help/self-answer |
Again, it's easy!