Interestingly the one external resource on the freebsd.org navigation bar is
Community > Q&A (external) which links to
Server Fault, part of the Stack Exchange family.
This came up in a different discussion about the navbar where I was surprised so much prominence is given to a site where only 8 FreeBSD-tagged questions were answered last year! There's actually more FreeBSD activity at the
Linux & Unix Stack Exchange site judging on the number of answered questions per year which are tagged as FreeBSD-related, I've picked out a few relevant Stack Exchange sites:
Code:
Stack Exchange site 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
==============================================================================
stackoverflow.com 140 139 138 131 76 65 56 49 27 25 12
serverfault.com 110 108 66 52 53 29 26 22 12 12 8
unix.stackexchange.com 99 147 147 131 147 98 67 61 46 37 29
superuser.com 37 29 26 27 24 13 16 6 8 2 4
Those numbers are found by search queries of the form
https://unix.stackexchange.com/search?q=[freebsd]+isanswered:yes+created:2023
Obviously these sites have different scopes: SO is meant only for programming questions, Server Fault is for servers in a professional environment only, while unix.stackexchange.com and the less used
Super User handle a wider range of topics, more like these forums or the Reddit community. Activity on all those Stack Exchange sites has tailed off markedly, and I'm not sure any of them currently deserve a prominent external link in the site and forum navbar, but
https://unix.stackexchange.com/ might still be worth a shot for someone with a suitable question.
It would be interesting to get a feel, at least a
Fermi estimate to order of magnitude, for what throughput of FreeBSD questions get answered in other corners of the internet - I see
grahamperrin has pre-emptively posted while I was typing this! (But my post will spend some time in the moderation queue so my reply won't be very timely.)
Not everything that's answered is marked as such. I never attempted to count.
A quick count: bash page down until first questions marked as "2y ago" appear. Search browser for "ago": 249 matches. Search for "2y ago": 69 matches (I might have bashed a few too many times...). Estimated number of answered questions on Reddit within past year:
249 - 69 = 180. Several times more than all the Stack Exchange sites combined! It's also not a like-for-like comparison as Stack Exchange counts a question as "answered" if it has received any replies ("answers" in Stack Exchange parlance), helpful or not to the OP, whereas on Reddit the thread needs to be explicitly marked as answered. That's not always done even when the replies did help the OP, so it's closer to having an "accepted answer" in the Stack Exchange model. In reality the numbers must be even more favourable for Reddit. I think it's fair to say a couple of questions get answered on average every day, so the true figure might well be more like the low thousands - and I suspect there are other venues (Discord? IRC? mailing lists?) with a throughput of thousands queries answered per year too. The Stack Exchange network, despite being very searchable, is not one of them.
