Should we be allowing specific support questions for specific software or online genealogy sites?

Question

Should we be allowing specific support questions for specific software or online genealogy sites?

It seems to me that we should and we can keep things straight with tagging.

Answer 1

I'm going to take Justin's list and add a 4th:

1) General software support - How do I install my genealogy software? My datafile is corrupt, how can I recover? How should I backup my datafile?

2) Specific genealogy questions - How do I add a source? How do I add an event? Can I export just a branch from my tree?

3) Website usage questions - How do I reset my Ancetry.com password?

4) Shopping/List questions - Do you know of any genealogy software that does X?

`#1 and #3 I'd say would best be served by the folks at Super User, but I wouldn't necessarily suggest kicking people out the door right away. For now, I suggest judging these on a case by case basis. If the people here can't help, then directing them elsewhere isn't a bad idea.

When evaluating whether or not a question should be on-topic or off-topic, I urge everyone to reference the following quote from one of our community managers in Respect the community – your own, and others’:

Be a bit jealous of your site – don’t blithely turn askers away simply because their question could be asked somewhere else. Don’t hit them over the head with your scope, help them tailor their question to fit into it – and if that means your site’s scope overlaps a bit with another site’s, so be it.

For #2, I'd say if it applies to the field of genealogy or researching family histories, then those questions should be more than welcome here.

I'd suggest being extremely wary of questions under #4. They definitely shouldn't be part of the private beta, and in most cases they really shouldn't be part of a public beta or graduated site. Questions asking for lists of software tend to attract a lot of spam. Also, they're really not all that helpful in most cases. It's hard to tell whose link is the best. :)

Answer 2

Most genealogy societies have special interest groups (SIGS) devoted to specific genealogy software or computer types (like a Mac group, for instance). These are consistently formed because this is what the community needs and wants... so asking questions about genealogy software is a common occurrence and likely welcome within the community.

Also, because the average age of genealogy enthusiasts tends to skew high, there are many users who have not grown up with computers that have A LOT of questions - some basic and some not. The community, as a whole, accepts this and it has bread an encouraging and patient attitude towards coaching others through computer & software issues.

Also, with the higher age, getting users to trust this site may be a feat in itself, but punting them somewhere else after they ask a question may cause them to panic and give up the site altogether.

I agree that the community will perceive greater value by keeping the questions here and separating them through tagging. Tags for specific software is also likely to encourage tag subscription, which may turn out to be very similar to a SIG.

Answer 3

Some of the expert genealogists here are software developers for genealogy software.

I'm not going to give an opinion, but do you want these expert programmer-genealogists to come here and be part of this Q&A? Most will probably do so if there are questions about their software for them to answer. But is that good or bad?

Should this site be another place for Q&A's about how to do something in a particular genealogy software program? Do we want to provide what a user forum for a software program might do?

What about programs that don't have user forums. Where do those users go?

Tricky question. I don't know.

Answer 4

I would split this into three categories.

1) General software support - How do I install my genealogy software? My datafile is corrupt, how can I recover? How should I backup my datafile?

2) Specific genealogy questions - How do I add a source? How do I add an event? Can I export just a branch from my tree?

3) Website usage questions - How do I reset my Ancetry.com password?

Type (1) should be migrated to Superuser. Type (2) we should either handle here, close as off topic, or migrate to super user. Type (3) we should close as off topic.

For (2) I recommend that we handle them here. Creating a tag for each application that comes up isn't out of the question, though Software could be a generic tag for them all.

Answer 5

I added a second answer, as my first didn't really address the issue of how to tag these questions:

Tags:

If you think about it, every question is a sort of support question. Some might not be about software, but a question could be about support for a technique or a process. Therefore, it would seem odd to tag software support questions but not support for processes.

If we look at many other sites, the tags tend to describe what the question is about. For instance, the "Geni" tag might tell me the question is about the http://geni.com family tree website, and "journaling" may tell me the question is about keeping family journals. Tagging software questions as "support" or "general-software-genealogy-usage" may get a bit overwhelming and confusing.

For instance, on Stack Overflow, there is a tag for Java, C, C++, and all of the other various languages. Following this approach, it seems like "Geni", "Ancestry.com", etc may be better tags. Thoughts?

Answer 6

I think there is a significant hybrid category arising from jmort253 extension to Justin's list. It spans #2 (how do I ...) and #4 (what does ...).

I embellished an existing answer to How should I record sex change/gender reassignment? as though the question were framed as "Software package X does function M, (how) can I do that with package Y?"

I added a comment indicating that I thought this was slippery slope.