We need a community forum for discussion ~ or we need to use the ones we have...

Question

Where do we make it happen? Who's going to join me in being the core team on this site and let us define what we want the site to be?

I'm in favor of using the third place (the place that's not meta or the main site) for discussions, even if we are separated across the globe. I know not everyone likes the third place, or even knows it exists.

Shall we have some community discussion on this question then? I know we have these questions:

How do we promote our site?

Migration of questions vs. marking duplicate / Is there a facility for marking questions as "Duplicate of SO question"?

How long is the beta period and when is it finished?

Where to draw the DBA/DB developer line?

But I don't feel that we've made the proper moves to make this site what it can be. We've gotten some definition, but we've not gotten any good solid traction. There's still discussion ongoing as to do we want to accept SQL questions or not, as when I chose to migrate this question:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5023529/doing-two-select-query-with-the-second-query-dependant-of-the-first-and-the-res

based on the discussion here:

What kind of questions are allowed on Database Administrators ?

So I ask you, fellow dba users, where shall we discuss our site and get motivated about it being a real site, or shall we just collectively sigh, grumble, and retreat to our queryplans and server monitoring?

Answer 1

These are things that should happen here, on meta.dba, for a couple of reasons:

• They leave permanent artifacts that continue to provide value for users who read them 6-8 vague-units-of-time later.
• The community can vet the suggestions proposed via voting.
• Meta posts can be featured in the sidebar on the main site. While chat ads also appear, there is no content or context to them.

This doesn't mean chat shouldn't be used at all. Just think of it as a supplement rather than a replacement. The meta site is for questions about the site - and the questions you mention are about the site. If related discussions do take place in chat - and sure sometimes it is easier to hash things out in a real-time environment like that - please transfer a summary or "final thoughts" back here to meta so that the benefits listed above are still present.