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Moving the Support to Reddit

Moving the Support to Reddit

We have moved the support to Reddit on the subreddit r/cn1 for open discussion, support and also to allow the users to help each other.

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We used Google Groups as our main/secondary support channel for a while now. It sucked, but it was a shortcut to get things going and like many things, it just stuck.

A couple of weeks ago we made the decision to create a new subreddit r/cn1 and move our support to that sub.

This has multiple advantages for us and for the community. As such we’re asking you to join that group. Don’t just visit it, register and press the “Join” button to be a part of it.

Why Leave Google Group?

The Google Group sucked because of bad spam detection. Over zealous auto-moderation. Horrible UI and constant changes to that UI.

This even included removal of important features such as code highlighting and post pinning. Those two were the final straws.

Why Reddit?

With Reddit there are multiple advantages we can leverage out of the box. Decent native apps, integrations, code highlighting, state of the art moderation and threaded discussions, image embedding, links, advanced styling and more.

To be fair there are a couple of things that don’t work as nicely, namely email digests and attachments.

Some Tips for Reddit

You can enable a daily email digest on Reddit in your user email settings page. This isn’t the same as an automatic email on every post but it’s good enough. I personally use Feedly which includes the ability to track a subreddit and that’s pretty useful for keeping track of r/cn1 as well as other interests I have.

Attachments shouldn’t be in the discussion forum. There’s images which you can add using an image post (which I encourage doing).

For short amounts of code/logs you can add a comment with source code.

For longer sources, file an issue in GitHub, include a link to a GitHub gist file or something similar to that.

Support Us

Please take the time to:


These things take a moment of your time but go a long way to demonstrate our traction to new Codename One developers.

Thank you!

3 Comments

  • Francesco Galgani says:

    Are there any situations where we should prefer Reddit to Stack Overflow or vice versa?

    • Shai Almog says:

      They are pretty distinct. Stack overflow is strictly for “worthy questions” and that might be a gray area. If you feel less confident then our subreddit aims to be more welcoming. Since we’re the moderators of the subreddit we have more control over things posted and won’t moderate you aggressively like stackoverflow sometimes does (unfortunately).

      I like SO, it takes getting used to though.

      • Francesco Galgani says:

        Thanks for the clarification. I like Stack Overflow which I’ve gotten used to by now and I think I’ll continue to use it, but as you told the moderation is a bit too aggressive. By the way, there are borderline issues, such as asking for advice, for which Stack Overflow is not suitable and neither is Github. So I understand the choice of Reddit.

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