Questions about new GIS tool being downvoted or closed

Question

In Moving community of GIS tool to GIS Stack Exchange I asked if it was possible to move the SEPAL GIS community to the GIS Stack Exchange, or at least let people ask questions there.

I understand that sepal as a cloud platform (open source and freely accecible to anyone) is not as famous and vastly used as other software like Google Earth Engine but I was thinking it has it place on a GIS website.

Obviously, none of our question will actually be related to complex code, but rather usage of data provider with screenshots. something that I've seen for QGIS and ArcGIS Desktop, so again no problem.

My first question was closed, and my last one (that is answering a problem that many of our users are facing right now) has already received 2 downvotes without a single comment (Cannot download Planet data from SEPAL). I have all the difficulties in the world to convince my colleagues that GIS Stack Exchange is the right place to integrate the open source community but this not helping.

Will all the questions we ask be downvoted, or closed, or can we continue using GIS Stack Exchange ?

Answer 1

From looking at all questions tagged sepal (three so far) it seems to me that they have been generally well-received, so I do not think that you should be too worried about the odd downvote and/or close votes. Our community provides those to let you know when they think your Q&As may not be useful, or may be off-topic. You should not ignore them, because both tell you that those particular posts may need to be improved through editing.

One comment that I'll make is that I noticed you are including dark background images on our light background site. I find these hard to view, and thus distracting, rather than helpful, to making what you are asking clear.

Answer 2

It would probably be better if the questions were asked by your users rather than yourself. While there is nothing wrong with self answered questions in general it looks a little odd if all of the questions and answers for a tag are by a single user.

In may be better in some cases to simply improve your documentation (or code) to make things like the limits to an API key clearer. It should be noted that currently your latest question has 3 votes to close it as "Questions that relate to the business of vendors and product teams, such as licensing, pricing, release dates, submission of bug reports and enhancement requests, etc, are off-topic here and should be directed instead to the official software support teams." So it seems that the community thinks this is a vendor or support issue rather than something best answered here.

So will all the question we ask be downvoted or closed or can we continue using GIS.stackexchange ?

I think that any questions that you ask that the community doesn't think are appropriate will be downvoted, I would recommend letting your users ask questions and then be vigilant in answering them well so that they become a useful resource.