Should questions be asked here or on Stack Overflow?

Hi!

The front page banner suggests to ask questions on Stack Overflow:

However, I only see two new questions at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/tidb in all of 2025. There is a magnitude more questions and activity at ask.pingcap.com so far in 2025.

Just trying to understand should people use Stack Overflow for TiDB questions and discussions or not?

There is also pingcap · Discussions · GitHub, but seems it is older and it was replaced by this ask.pingcap.com.

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I also see that Google is indexing and showing results from ask.pingcap.com pretty well, so perhaps this still is the primary place for posting questions and answers in a structured way?

Hi otto, thanks for reaching out with your question! We aim to have discussions take place on platforms that allow for more interactivity. As a result, most of our Q&A and community engagement currently happen on Discord and Slack.

We are currently working on optimizing the GitHub Discussions section and will update the related guidance asap.

Support Resources lists resources as well and should be kept in sync.

I think there are arguments for either method:

  • Having a single place for Questions/Discussions: this would make it easier to monitor a single place and maybe have some way to point people to previously answered questions more easily.
  • Support many places: This gives people the freedom to use whatever platform they prefer. This might allow people to ask questions without having to create a new account and may allow people to use more free/open alternatives.

It might be good to support all places, but have a strong suggestion about what the main/best place is.

If you look at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/tidb?tab=Newest, there are only a few questions from 2025. One reason might be that Stack Overflow closes TiDB questions as “unrelated” and they never get published.
I experienced this myself in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79609705/is-tidb-compatible-with-wordpress

You might want to consider recommending people to ask on the DBA Stackexchange, which now also has a tidb tag.

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