Getting game questions from stack overflow over here? (not merging but recommending them to post here)

Question

I was looking over in the stack overflow questions and every now and then there are some questions relating to Unity development or strange things that are happening in someones game.

Why can't there be a little note that gets shown the the person writing the question with a certain tag (e.g. Virtual reality, one of the popular game engines, etc.) that just tells then there is a dedicated stack exchange for questions like this?

Would't it be better to post here to get answers from actual game developers and people that use the tools on a daily basis rather than general developers?

Answer 1

I don't think we'd have any problems here to deal with questions migrated from SO, however, I think this would be better discussed on the SO meta than here.

An option would be to simply leave a comment to the OP, telling them that there is a GDSE where they could probably get more/better answers, and that they could use that in the future.

I don't think there is a pre-defined path from SO to here in the flag/vote system, but another option I see is flagging questions for moderator attention, suggesting to move the question here. But before flagging, you should ask how this would be received by the moderators community there: you don't want to be tagged as flagging uselessly. And I don't know if mods move questions with a great ease, a smile and a happy heart, or they get annoyed every time because the process is not fun...

Answer 2

This idea of more actively promoting that questions asked on SO with certain game-development-related tags (unity, for example) be asked here instead is really something you'd want to bring up on the SO meta itself.

Game development questions aren't off-topic on StackOverflow though, so it's totally valid for those questions to be asked there.

Indeed there are quite a few questions on SO that appear to be game development related, but in fact are what we'd consider here to be game development adjacent (that is, the asker is making a game and describes a problem within that context, but it's fundamentally a basic programming issue and thus better suited to SO). I've occasionally poked through the game-related tags over there and not found a lot of questions I'd really be happy having here.

Automated tag-based suggestions can't pick up on those nuances and might very easily result in an unpleasant experience for askers, who start asking on SO, are suggested to instead post on GDSE, and then get their question immediately closed with the "ask this on SO" close reason.

It could also encourage cross-posting, which isn't cool.

I don't personally feel the need to campaign for this kind of thing; our community is different from the StackOverflow community, and we should respect their community and guidelines as they respect ours. There's definitely overlap in content sometimes but I think that's fine, I don't really think that each SE site needs to be so rigidly silo'd off.