Hello Gazebo Community,
I have some exciting news for you. We’re planning to migrate ROS Answer and Gazebo Answers to the Robotics Stack Exchange! This will help make ROS and Gazebo Q&A more discoverable and make it easier to find relevant answers.
Being part of the Stack Exchange network has a lot of significant benefits. It has a much more thorough moderator workflow and privilege escalation path. The meta discussion board is valuable. https://robotics.meta.stackexchange.com/ It has bots which poke questions which it things could get an answer as well as cull old ones. It has a close voting system. There’s good documentation of how to answer question and it’s generally better at rewarding contributions. The user experience is also significantly improved over what we can offer on answers.ros.org and gazebosim.ros.org. Finally, we won’t have to worry as much about redirecting people to ask a robotics but not ROS or Gazebo question to another location.
What’s going to happen?
We’ve been working with Stack Overflow to prepare for a data migration. We will be moving ROS Answers and Gazebo Answers to read only mode and then migrating questions, answers, and comments to Robotics Stack Exchange via the API. The Stack Overflow team will help us do things beyond what the API allows to provide an even better migration experience. We will maintain the existing site in read only mode for a period of time as well as looking at options to setup redirects to the new question locations for the maintenance of deep links.
To make our arrival on Robotics Stack Exchange a positive impact we will be using heuristics to only migrate answers that have demonstrated value. This will take the form of a heuristic filter such as one that only moves questions with answers that have been accepted or have one or more upvotes. Questions that have no answers but at least two upvotes will also be moved. Comments will be migrated and attributions maintained.
What should you do?
In the next few weeks log into ROS Answers and review any questions that you have asked, and accept any answers that you find valuable. In addition if there are any questions or answers that you find valuable on the site please make sure to vote them up, so that they will be preserved in the migration.
We also ask that you create an account on Robotics Stack Exchange and start answering questions there. There are many of us who have a lot of experience answering questions on ROS and Gazebo Answers, and it will be important for us to migrate to Robotics Stack Exchange as well.
Please let us know your thoughts. If you have something that you’d like to reach out to us about that’s not appropriate for a public forum you can reach the team working on the migration at answers-se-migration@openrobotics.org
FAQ
- Why now?
There’s been a perennial question of why doesn’t the ROS community just use Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange. We are not a perfect fit for Stack Overflow proper. Recently Stack Overflow has committed to hosting it so we have their public commitment to keep hosting it by taking Robotics Stack Exchange out of Beta status.
- When will this happen?
We are still testing the migration scripts. We expect to make this happen sometime before the end of the year, hopefully in November.