Members answering questions about Apple frameworks

[Karl]

@Jumhyn

What is not reasonable, IMO, is telling users that their post is off-topic without verifying that yourself simply because the question mentions an Apple framework.

Not at all: I think users should justify that this is the appropriate forum for their question.

Anything else is untenable. In order to say for sure where the problem lies, we need to debug it. That means trying to debug how all of SwiftUI's various property wrappers, result builders, and other (potentially undocumented) features work - using pure guesswork, because we don't actually have knowledge about any of that stuff. That's why it is better to use the actual SwiftUI support forum for those sorts of questions.

The core concept that you are ignoring here is: triage. Issues need to get sorted and classified by those best equipped to do that. It may be that users later get referred back to these forums.

But if we start with the business of trying to guesswork-debug SwiftUI, this then very quickly becomes the SwiftUI support forum.

@Karl

At the same time, due to the high number of SwiftUI-specific posts on these forums, it is helpful if members could reduce their use of library types before posting. Otherwise, they may be advised to seek support with the library developer before seeking support on forums for lower-level components. That is how it should be.

If there is unexpected behaviour in an application, users should likewise seek support from the application developer, before asking the OS developer or chip manufacturer. The issue may indeed lie with those lower-level components, but unless you can produce a reduced demonstration, it is in general difficult to isolate where the problem lies. If members don't do that themselves, they should expect to be directed to a more appropriate forum.

In this case, it only became clear that this was a language question once the library-specific components were eliminated. That is the proper way things should work.

@Jumhyn

I think this is unfair to the OP of that topic. They explicitly said that they posted here because (in addition to being disillusioned with the ADF) they suspected there was an underlying language issue that they didn't understand. And they were right! This is exactly the kind of question that should be asked on these forums.

Just because this one question happened to be reducible does not justify the principle. If they were not able to reduce the problem themselves, they should have asked a higher-level support forum or filed a bug report.

@Jumhyn

You said yourself that you "don't like to [tell users their post is off-topic]," and the moderators have expressed that they are happy to do so, so why take it upon yourself if you don't want to do the verification work yourself?

The moderators are not actually doing it, which is why I've had to go around mopping up threads that were clearly only about SwiftUI.

I know that it isn't popular - everybody seems to be in agreement that Apple's forums suck. Members here are definitely looking for any excuse to ignore Apple's policy and turn this in to a SwiftUI support forum. I think that's very obvious.

@tkremenek - this is Apple's policy, I think it's clear that it needs to be clarified.