Comments on Should we have a sub-forum for less structured, forum-style discussions?
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Should we have a sub-forum for less structured, forum-style discussions?
I was about to post a question to another music DSP forum about collecting free and open learning materials to a website. I wanted to post such a great idea to a non-ad-supported website, such as Codidact. However, the discussion around, for example, the feasibility of such a website does not follow the Q&A format. So if I wished to write about this idea to e.g. electrical.codidact, then I cannot do this.
Now, if music DSP is not your cup of tea, then the question could be asked about free EE learning materials too.
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Back and forth discussion is not suited to the Q&A format that this web site is set up for. As far as I know, the Codidact software is not capable of a category that supports threaded discussions anyway. Discussions also tend to have low signal to noise ratio. The high density of quality content is why many users are here.
Another problem with your specific example is that things like lists of learning materials don't age well. We don't allow shopping questions here for the same reason, since component purchase recommendations age quickly.
We don't want to get into popularity contests about subjective issues, like which book is better than which other book, where there is no reasonably measurable right or wrong answer.
We do have the Papers category, which is for one-way presentation of information. However, that is limited to real facts, results of experiments, and the like. Post are intended to be somewhat scholarly, but not as rigorous as peer-reviewed papers. Our voting and comment systems essentially substitute for peer-reviews.
A carefully curated Paper could be a place where you gather references to currently available information on your topic. Since such things don't age well, it would be a good idea to prominently attach dates to the various recommendations. You can update the post periodically with new information and update the dates accordingly. If the post is eventually left to languish, at least it will be immediately obvious how old the recommendations are.
There is also Codidact chat. I know little about it, since I'm not interested in low-content kaffeeklatches. Others may be able to chime in here with more information about chat.
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