Supporting Developers on Stack Overflow

Today we are excited to launch facebook.stackoverflow.com, a partnership with programming Q&A site Stack Overflow to support Facebook Platform developers. Many Facebook engineers actively participate on Stack Overflow, along with some of the most knowledgeable Facebook developers, making it one of the best places for you to get help with your technical questions.

This partnership replaces our existing forums, which, while worked effectively at the beginning of Platform, have begun to show their age. We spent many months looking at the right long-term solution and decided that a partnership with one of the best technical Q&A sites on the Web was the best approach for our community.

To get started, click on the Q&A link on the Support page on the Developer Site or visit facebook.stackoverflow.com. You will see a Facebook-tag filtered view of questions:

To begin asking or answering questions, log in with your Facebook account by clicking on the Login button on the right-hand side or on the top banner found on a Question page:

You can also log in with your existing Stack Overflow account and add your Facebook login information to it. As you participate, you achieve more points and increase your reputation in the community.

Reputation is a rough measurement of how much the community trusts you. The higher reputation you earn, the more privileges you gain on Stack Overflow. To learn more about Stack Overflow, review their mission and FAQ.

Questions added to Documentation

Relevant questions from Stack Overflow will soon be displayed in our docs. A section at the bottom of each API method doc will display the top five questions, sorted by the number of votes:

This feature rolling out slowly over the next few weeks.

Getting support from Facebook

With this move, we decided to make our Developer Forum “read-only” after September 1 in order to better support you on Stack Overflow. A banner has been placed at the top of the Forum encouraging you to post all new questions on Stack Overflow.

If you’d like to continue participating in the developer community, join us in the Facebook Developers Group, where the Developer Relations team is going to be hanging out.

Moving forward, Stack Overflow is where you’ll go to have your Facebook Platform questions answered; Bugs is where you go to report an issue with a legitimate repro, and you should participate in the Group to discuss, chat, and talk with us directly.

Weekly stats

As part of Operation Developer Love, we will now report the number of questions asked/answered and tagged “facebook” on Stack Overflow instead of stats from the Developer Forum on our weekly Platform Updates.

We look forward to your technical questions on Stack Overflow. Please share any feedback in the Comments below.