5

I'm seeing a trend on other stack exchange sites to using Stack Exchange as an official website for user questions (e.g. StackOverflow for RestSharp, or Drupal for Drupal)

Is this something that is sanctioned by the community (and the owners)?

In particular, I'm working on a mobile version of an existing board game. I expect many users will have questions about the game itself. For those types of questions, is it okay to post on the web site that such questions should be asked here, and will be answered here.

To be clear, I'm not talking about reporting defects, but rather using this site instead of creating something like a google group for community support.

Benefits I see are that the questions will be public, and since they may relate to either the print version or the iOS/Android versions, anyone can answer.

The downside is possibly pollution of the questions on this site, when they are not related to gameplay, but really are "Why doesn't it load?!" or the like.

2 Answers 2

6

No. Going by the pattern on Stack Overflow, Web Apps, and other similar sites, using an SE site as the official, primary support channel for a product is strongly discouraged. None of the other SE sites that focus on specific products are official support sites for those products. (There are occasional specific exceptions, such as Ask Ubuntu and the Facebook tag on Stack Overflow, for a time, but those arrangements were set up by the SE team in cooperation with the leaders of those particular projects on a case-by-case basis. Besides, the Facebook experiment didn't really work out well, and Ask Ubuntu is still one of several officially recognized support sites.)

If you want to post on your game's website that BC&G is a resource (among others) that clients can use to ask questions about game play, that's fine. If people ask questions about the game here of their own accord, that's fine. Even if it gets to the point where far more questions are asked about your game on BC&G than on your own forum or mailing list or whatever you want to set up, that's fine. But it has to happen organically. This site shouldn't be the single canonical reference for questions and answers about your game.

Of course, again, that's the way things typically work on other sites. Perhaps the BC&G community would like to adopt a different policy on this matter, in which case none of the above applies.

3
  • 2
    I'd be curious to hear what others think about trying this out. We sure could use a little more traffic... I'd be okay with a trial run as an official gameplay-related question site as long as technical issues remained off-topic. May 4, 2012 at 22:04
  • BGG supports games on they forum without being a official way. Why not support indie games or new games here, that of course are on site (not computer games). In the case of OP, his game is out of this site (is a computer game, I don't care if the game is like a table one).
    – gbianchi
    May 8, 2012 at 12:58
  • I like the idea of becoming a support channel. Lots of exposure, and you can always just ignore the tag if you're not interested
    – Hyppy
    Jun 15, 2012 at 4:07
2

You should ask on Gaming.StackExchange. Computer versions of board games are on-topic there, as are tech support questions, so as long as you are going to watch the site to help make sure that questions don't go unanswered, I think it would be fine. Its even something that I've brought up on meta in the past and seems to have gotten support there.

https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2096/have-we-considered-trying-to-get-game-developers-to-use-gaming-se-as-their-qa-f

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .