Discuss Forum Not Cutting It

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1

Not sure who to ask or where I can request this.

I can’t help but notice that most of my discuss questions go unanswered.

Not to compare PHP with the Play Framework but, when I was learning PHP I found the comments/notes people left behind very helpful in learning PHP.

Here is random page of the PHP manual with a list of helpful comments/notes below the official guide.
http://php.net/manual/en/install.macosx.php

I was wondering if something like this can be implemented in the Play Documentation.

Please advise,

Thanks,

2

Hey @AlbaroPereyra,

From some comment there:

14 years ago

I think this is a problem with the comments there. How useful is a comment from 14 years ago? And if the comments are filtered by version, we can have the problem of some version having a bunch of comments and some having none.

I would say that this has another cause not related to being able to comment at the docs or not. Right now I think the forums are relatively new (compared with PHP notes, for example) and also it competes with other channels (Gitter, StackOverflow, etc.). We also need to promote them better.

Do you have any suggestion on how to engage the community here? I prefer to try something in these terms before adding another channel (documentation comments).

Best.

3

In my humble opinion the 14 year old comment adds a lot to the content.

Let’s take messages for example, a few years back someone maybe implementing their own messages by passing a String, String map to the Twirl template while, someone last year may simply call messages, and someone today may pass the request over to Twirl. In an unofficial unstructured way this is giving the reader who wants to seek more information beyond the guide a perspective of evolution.

Also I am not sure why, but it seems the guide has been rewritten, instead of being updated. This is a problem in and of it self. You have people in the community referencing the old guide because it either has better graphics to illustrate a point or the page is missing all together(Thinking of Authorization here).

I honestly see the discuss forums as a horrible bootleg version of the Stack Over flow forums. The fact that they both use tags to organize topics makes them useless, unless they are being indexed, like Stack Overflow is by Google. They should at least be tied to an official guide.

The idea being that anyone who reads and understands the guide should be familiar enough with the topic in order to answer questions related to the topic.

For example today I have a question regarding Twirl templates. I am not sure where to ask, since twirl is a siloed project that is heavily use by the Play Framework. How can I ask this question so that people who have the same question while reading the guide can access it?
It is related to the topic, but not important enough to be part the guide.