Providing open source support from stackoverflow.com

Question

We're starting an new open source project soon and was wondering if I could provide halp and support to the community via stackoverflow by directing our users to raising their questions there. The material would be fairly technical but I could imagine there would be some posts that fall outside the sweet-spot for stackoverflow.

I can see the benefit of having the support provided from an active site and plus the visibility it would give our project.

Has anyone ever tried this before? Did it work? Are we just going to piss off the stackoverflow community?

Answer 1

If it's not a programming question, it'll be closed. Pretty much period.

Answer 2

It might be a better match for the forthcoming http://www.superuser.com/. Either way, it may be better to be a little more focused and manage it yourself, be it through mailing lists, a web fourm, or some other medium.

Answer 3

I think it is fair so long as the question is technical in nature. There are a lot of questions on Subsonic, Fluent NHibernate and NHibernate for example.

If you are developing a piece of software rather than a library it would be better for you to direct to the forthcoming Super User site.

Answer 4

If questions are tagged with the product name once it's released, that would be OK, but during the development phase, I'd say set up a site for it somewhere with a Blog and Forums.

You may also want to use something like Bugzilla to manage feature creation and issue management.

Good luck!