It was my decision to encourage Cognito Forms users to ask questions on Web Apps they could not answer via our help site. I based this decision on our teams extensive use and love for Stack Exchange (especially Stack Overflow) along with our goal of transparency when assisting our users.
My intent was to model our support process after the setup then used by Trello, where we have a dedicated help site to answer most questions, and specific forms to submit feature requests and bug reports, while directly users to Stack Exchange to ask "how to" questions. Sadly, Trello now uses Desk.com and there is not much visibility into the types of questions being asked or the answers. For reference, here is a thread specifically discussing Trello's initial use of Stack Exchange and changes they made based on feedback from the Web Apps community.
However, in reviewing the specific wording on our support page, I see we failed to communicate our use of Stack Exchange Web Apps appropriately to our users. We should have been clear that this was a completely separate site with no affiliation with Cognito Forms. We will work to address this in our next release as we are already in the process of revamping our support page.
Additionally, we encourage users of WordPress to use the WordPress forums for questions about using our WordPress plugin. While most users do this, we do have a number that miss this hint, so we will work to make this more obvious as well. Unfortunately, we cannot select our users and for many this is their first exposure to the Stack Exchange family of websites.
We appreciate this feedback and would definitely like to hear specifics about how to encourage appropriate use of Stack Exchange Web Apps by our users!
