Whats the consequence of asking SwiftUI questions in this forum?

Pretty_Girl · 2023-05-02T13:03:32.610Z

I know the swiftUI not the main focus of this forum and many are frowned upon asking such questions.
But what if we keep asking swiftUI related questions here? will we get banned or get negative points etc?
Or is it ok?

I know theres a developer forum in apple to ask such questions --> which is a useless zombie zone which no one replies.

I know there are other websites like stackexchange etc (which the beginners get roasted asking beginner questions and negative points)

So, if we decide to ask the questions here instead, is it ok?

sveinhal · 2023-05-02T13:08:18.047Z

I think the most probable consequence is that you may not get the best answers, and that you may be advised to post your questions elsewhere. That said, I think most people will be friendly and try to answer your questions. But, you may get better results by asking over at Apple's developer forums instead.

Also, see this thread:

Is it ok to ask SwiftUI questions now? Site Feedback

I know in the past, I was re-directed to ask my SwiftUI questions, on Apple's Forum, which... is not too good. I've noticed now however, that there are more SwiftUI questions here. Is it ok to ask them now in 'Using Swift'?

Pretty_Girl · 2023-05-02T13:35:35.200Z

Thank you for the link to past similar questions. But I still want to hear the latest ideas of the forum users as things might have changed.

And apple developer forums are a complete joke. They should decide either recruit more in-house people who provide answers or to close it down completely as it's a useless place.

itaiferber · 2023-05-02T14:34:12.117Z

Pretty_Girl:

So, if we decide to ask the questions here instead, is it ok?

Sorry, maybe it's just me, but in context, I find this question very strange. This is the third thread in the past few days which you've been involved in revolving around the discussion of SwiftUI being off-topic for these forums:

Ban SwiftUI related questions
What code can be used as the pure swift (not swiftUI) as a user-interface?
Whats the consequence of asking SwiftUI questions in this forum?

I think it's been pretty well-covered that SwiftUI questions are undesired here, purely because they're not the focus of discussion for these forums. If that's the case, and you're well aware of it... what does it matter what happens if you keep asking? If a community asks you to not do <x>, instead of asking "well, what happens if I keep doing <x> anyway?"... wouldn't you just rather be respectful of the request and not do <x>?

Pretty_Girl:

But I still want to hear the latest ideas of the forum users as things might have changed.

It feels to me that you're fishing for some sort of response across these threads — either in complete support ("yes, we should be allowed to ask SwiftUI questions here"), or on the opposite end, something more vitriolic — which I don't think you're going to get here. Most members don't have strong opinions about SwiftUI questions: they're simply off-topic. Discussion is happening elsewhere.

Like @sveinhal says, you may still get answers to those questions (suboptimally), but most often you're simply going to be told that the questions are off-topic. Swift has a Code of Conduct which covers the forums too; off-topic questions aren't against the code of conduct in any way (unless you troll with them, or start spamming them), but they're largely just a waste of time and effort — both for you, the folks responding, and forum moderators.

Instead, why not invest that time and effort in a community which openly welcomes these questions? You mention not wanting to ask on StackExchange, and that you feel that the Apple Dev Forums aren't helpful, and that's alright; there are other communities out there.

/r/SwiftUI on Reddit focuses around SwiftUI exclusively, and folks ask and answer SwiftUI questions all day there
/r/iOSProgramming also on Reddit focuses around iOS programming in general, but plenty of SwiftUI questions come up all the time
/r/Swift focuses on Swift the language primarily, but SwiftUI questions do come up occasionally, and you may be pointed toward other resources on there
Across all of these communities, I've seen mention over time of dedicated Discord servers where folks get together to discuss these topics

This is off the top of my head, and I don't use SwiftUI, or participate with SwiftUI discussions there or elsewhere; I'm positive that further searching online can get you what you're looking for.

Regardless, wishing you luck in finding the answers to your questions, one way or another.

hborla · 2023-05-02T15:25:48.324Z

Pretty_Girl:

But I still want to hear the latest ideas of the forum users as things might have changed.

This answer still applies:

Is it ok to ask SwiftUI questions now?

just to be clear: there's no 'punishment' meted out for making off-topic posts other than possibly being redirected to the Apple Developer Forums and possibly having your post de-listed.

A 'SwiftUI question' is one which does not hinge on any particular feature of the Swift language other than the fact that SwiftUI happens to be written in Swift. A question about "why am I getting this compiler error in my SwiftUI view?" is likely to be on-topic (even if the answer involves details about SwiftUI APIs) because it's a question about the language that could have arisen from an entirely different framework. OTOH, a question about "why isn't this view updating when my property changes?" is likely on the other side of the line, in that the answer probably involves a discussion about how SwiftUI works.

The line can often be blurry, and especially for less experienced users it's not always going to be possible to determine before asking whether a given question is a SwiftUI question or a Swift question. If someone can't tell if they have a Swift question or a SwiftUI question, they should feel free to post here and let folks with more experience answer their question and/or redirect them to the correct forum as appropriate.

However, this sort of hyperbolic, unwelcoming language:

Pretty_Girl:

a useless zombie zone

Pretty_Girl:

are a complete joke

Pretty_Girl:

it's a useless place

used in any context is on the border of a Code of Conduct violation. Constructive criticism is welcome, but insults are not. I encourage you to read Swift.org - Code of Conduct.

taylorswift · 2023-05-02T21:45:35.985Z

hborla:

However, this sort of hyperbolic, unwelcoming language:

Pretty_Girl:

a useless zombie zone

Pretty_Girl:

are a complete joke

Pretty_Girl:

it's a useless place

used in any context is on the border of a Code of Conduct violation. Constructive criticism is welcome, but insults are not. I encourage you to read Swift.org - Code of Conduct .

unwelcoming? unwelcoming to whom?

the apple developer forums are a separate entity from the swift.org forums, and while insulting individual ADF community members might be covered by the swift.org code of conduct, i think it’s a real stretch to say insulting the ADF website itself is a code of conduct violation.

perhaps if i were the apple developer forums and i saw another forum calling me a useless zombie zone, i would not want to merge hiveminds either. but i doubt that the countless new users who keep migrating here from the ADF are going to be repelled because some of earlier arrivals are expressing why they migrated in the first place.

John_McCall · 2023-05-02T22:05:41.248Z

We do not want people to use that sort of language at all, in reference to anything. Part of the reason for that is that it contributes to threads rapidly deteriorating in tone, as in fact the last several threads started on this topic all have.

Pretty_Girl · 2023-05-03T02:15:00.665Z

Thanks a lot for the resources and a detailed reply.
I will go through the links you provided.

Pretty_Girl · 2023-05-03T02:20:13.798Z

Yeah I was just expressing how I feel about apple developer forums. I don't understand how it violates any of the code of conduct of this forum.

Pretty_Girl · 2023-05-03T02:21:26.543Z

Thank you for your reply.

roosterboy · 2023-05-03T07:22:28.556Z

There are other places besides here and the official Apple forums that you can ask SwiftUI questions. StackOverflow and Reddit, of course, but I would suggest Paul Hudson's Hacking with Swift and also the Code With Chris forums. Both are targeted at people learning Swift and SwiftUI, but they also have a lot of members who have experience with SwiftUI and are more than willing to answer questions.

anon9791410 · 2023-05-03T09:25:47.110Z

taylorswift:

unwelcoming to whom?

It was too early to be an AI project so somebody tried to do a good job over there. You can't remove an insult to the software completely from an insult to them. I consider it gray, but on the side of "against the code of conduct".

But that doesn't make it right to make things hard on people when there's a better solution in using a subform here temporarily while the UX of another site is actively improved, if that would ultimately be better for the community. (To the Reddit recommendations: it has people, but it does not handle all of the code examples we need well enough. And Discord, like Slack before it, is primarily designed for ephemerality and not good for research, like forums are.)

As for my posts being representative of "tone deterioration", I find it it useful when you folks that I respect flag them, and then the ones that criticize them. It doesn't necessarily change my offensive radical opinions , but it is educational for helping me to help other people get what they want out of life on the forums. Thank you.

I find this pronoun to be "unwelcoming" language".

John_McCall:

We do not want people to…

John_McCall:

we’re not having this here

I think it may be built into the Code of Conduct that a "professional setting" need (or is assumed to) not be democratic —i.e. "what is best for the community" is not declared by the community. Or at least, not by the "extended community"—the inconsistency between the two is deceptive.

Karl · 2023-05-03T14:46:05.134Z

I don't know if this is the right place to say this, or if they're even is a "right place", but I like the separation that we have. I like that there is a smaller community focussed on the Swift language and not the broader topics of everything you can do with frameworks written in Swift.

Those of us who used to write Objective-C will remember - we had no input on language evolution whatsoever. You could file radars, but there was no broader discussion with other developers inside and outside of Apple, and on very rare occasions language improvements would be presented to us and we basically had to take them as they were. It's a much better situation now; the language is developing a lot faster, we know more about what the goals are, and we get to give feedback much earlier in the cycle. At least for me, that's the thing I want to protect - it has professional value, but more to the point it's mentally stimulating and I've learned a lot being here.

If this forum were opened up more broadly, I fear that we'd lose that focus, and I think that would lead to less engagement across the board. I don't think anybody is going to suddenly get the sort of attention from Apple's SwiftUI team (or anybody else) that they seem to expect will happen if their problems/desires were posted to these forums instead of the existing channels.

If I were on the SwiftUI team and had many thousands (likely tens of thousands) of reports of "why doesn't X work like I expect?" or "why is there some glitch when I do Y?", I'd want to direct them to an organised bug-tracker such as Apple's feedback system so they can be triaged, investigated, and processed in an orderly fashion. I don't think the more informal setting of these forums scales to that kind of volume, and I would guess (and it is only a guess) that that's why there isn't as much direct communication on the Apple forums. You could easily spend all day, every day, providing SwiftUI support, and never run out of people who need help or have ideas for the next release.

But yeah, just briefly - that's the other side of the argument. It has nothing to do with "hatred" as some have described, or sadism, or causing/alleviating "suffering". That sort of hyperbole is not necessary.

tera · 2023-05-03T14:57:58.841Z

I'd agree with the first half of your message. IRT the second half - it may well help a lot if we had a dedicated SwiftUI forum in the same shape and format as this forum, with the laser focus on SwiftUI topics - maybe that's just the format that makes a difference. We can do a test run for a few months to see if that'll be any better or worse and if there's enough interest I can donate a few months worth of subscription fee for the discourse "standard" or "business" plan to test this idea.

Karl · 2023-05-03T15:13:24.381Z

Rather than guessing at solutions, it would probably be better to ask the SwiftUI team why they cannot engage with the Apple forums as much as developers would apparently like them to.

Maybe the problem is not that they just don't like the forums interface; maybe they just don't have the capacity and it would be more beneficial to expand Developer Technical Support. In any case, I think it's an internal matter.

Best I can suggest is to file feedbacks directly saying that you want more engagement on the Apple forums, and letting Apple figure out how to achieve that. I think that would be more productive than complaining that these forums don't have a wide-enough scope, or setting up yet another forum (I think it has been shown that there are plenty of existing forums).

tera · 2023-05-03T15:30:11.125Z

Karl:

Rather than guessing at solutions, it would probably be better to ask the SwiftUI team why they cannot engage with the Apple forums as much as developers would apparently like them to.

I would't mind having a forum very similar to this one with the focus on SwiftUI topics even if there was no members from SwiftUI team on it...

Karl:

Maybe the problem is not that they just don't like the forums interface

Hard to tell. Myself - I noticed that there is definitely something to the format of that forum - for starters it asks me to authenticate with the phone or other devices - that's definitely a friction point. Then the format is somewhat old (?) just different (?) not well organised (?) too broad (?) I can't really pinpoint to what exactly wrong with it, and probably no-one will be able answering that. Some of the mentioned alternatives share the same drawbacks.

David_Catmull · 2023-05-03T16:03:46.387Z

Karl:

Rather than guessing at solutions, it would probably be better to ask the SwiftUI team why they cannot engage with the Apple forums as much as developers would apparently like them to.

As a data point, last week I asked a SwiftUI question in the Apple developer forums. Within a couple of hours I had responses from two different Apple engineers and my issue was resolved pretty quickly.

taylorswift · 2023-05-03T19:49:47.001Z

Karl:

Rather than guessing at solutions, it would probably be better to ask the SwiftUI team why they cannot engage with the Apple forums as much as developers would apparently like them to.

i suppose the answer is the same as with any other framework: teaching and engineering are distinct and uncorrelated skillsets.

Karl · 2023-05-03T20:21:45.310Z

It is probably better not to speculate on skillsets. It runs the risk of coming across as insulting or pidgeonholing, even if it isn't targeted at any particular individual.

I will say, though, that Developer Technical Support (the 'teachers', I suppose?) is excellent. That's where we get The Wisdom Of Quinn from... and speaking of which:

Quinn’s Top Ten DevForums Tips (source)

Keep your expectations realistic

DevForums is an informal support channel; no one is being paid to answer DevForums questions full time. Keep that in mind when you post.

Apple provides a number of formal support channels. To request formal support, go to the Apple Developer > Contact Us page.

One of those support channels is the code-level support provided by Apple Developer Technical Support (DTS). For more information about DTS, see Apple Developer > Support > Requesting Technical Support.

Asking about Apple’s unannounced plans is unlikely to yield useful results. Apple folks can’t discuss The Future™, and non-Apple folks can only speculate.

Apple folks can’t discuss Apple’s internal business practices. For example, we can’t answer why question — “Why did Apple do this?” or “Why hasn’t Apple done that?” — unless there’s existing documentation that offers an explanation. If you think Apple should do something differently, file a bug that explains what you’d like to see change and the rationale for that.

Not everyone works the same hours as you do. DevForums is a worldwide community, so there are time zones to consider, but there’s also just individual preferences. This is especially relevant around weekends, where your reply on Friday may not be seen by other folks until Monday.

Different folks use DevForums in different ways. Some folks lean in to the notification system, whereas others allocate certain times of the day, or the week, to help out.

If you think Apple should devote more resources to DevForums, that might qualify as a discussion about "internal business practices" and you should file a bug requesting that specifically.

jeudesprits · 2023-05-03T21:24:45.174Z

Or maybe just create a section SwiftUI in the category Related Projects, exactly as it is done with GRDB or Vapor? If someone finds the question interesting enough, answer it. If the question doesn't contain anything in any way related to Swift in the context of SwiftUI, the question will either be deleted or simply left unanswered.