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Jon Skeet
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I'm going to go against the grain here: I don't like it. It's one thing for SO to be a user-to-user forum so that fellow developers can help solve problems, but I don't think it's really appropriate for reporting bugs and making feature requests for technology vendors (whether open source contributors or companies) to reply to.

It's hard to pin down exactly why I feel that way, but I think it's to do with the relationship between the users. On SO, the moderators are those who have proved themselves worthy in a general community sense. On a technology-specific forum, I'd expect the moderators to be associated with that technology. They should be able to close a feature request as "declined" (with a reason) or mark a bug as fixed, etc. There's a level of power, responsibility and knowledge which has nothing to do with what the users are like in the more general terms of SO.

I think it's fine for SO to be one of the encouraged ways that users help to solve each other's problems, but I wouldn't want it to be the primary support forum for a technology.

Just MHO.

Jon Skeet
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