14 DAY TRIAL // Google Groups has been rather neglected for many years. At least that's what the three people using it say. In a sign of Google further abandoning its own site or of it getting with the times, probably the second, YouTube is moving its discussions and support forums for the YouTube API to Stack Overflow.
Stack Overflow is already the best place to get technical answers for anything relating to programing and the likes and YouTube is hardly the first to make the jump.
It makes sense too, the audience is larger than whatever it got on the YouTube Google Groups and knowledgeable. What's more, the users were already there, but they weren't getting any official responses.
"Many of you are already familiar with the terrific Stack Overflow website, which has become the de facto resource on the web for all types of programming questions," YouTube wrote.
"And many of you have been asking YouTube API questions on Stack Overflow for some time now, but haven’t received any official responses from the YouTube API Developer Relations team," it explained.
"We’ve decided that instead of continuing to maintain a dedicated Google Group for YouTube API questions, it would help more users if we focused on responding to Stack Overflow posts," it announced.
Anyone asking anything about the YouTube API can expect to get answers from the official team. To make sure you get an answer and a prompt one you should add the "youtube-api" tag to the question, to make it easier to discover.
The Google Groups discussion will be archived on October 15, meaning no new entries will be allowed, but you can already get answers on Stack Overflow.
That won't be the only communication channel of course, Stack Overflow will be for questions exclusively. Bug reports and feature requests must be filed properly, just like now. There will also be announcements via Google Groups or the official blog.