What role should QC.SE play as a Qiskit and other quantum SDK's support forum?

Question

The [qiskit] tag has over 1200 questions on QC.SE. There are lots of examples of "good" questions and helpful answers. However, in my limited experience, a number of qiskit tagged questions are closed due to the fact that they are strictly programming questions about the qiskit SDK rather than questions about quantum computing, which is totally justified in my opinion.

However, I just discovered that Qiskit actually funnels users to QC.SE (see the bottom of the landing page here under the support heading). Not only do they link to QC.SE, but as far as I am aware there are not any IBM-supported forum pages for Qiskit, other than documentation. Now perhaps that is just because Qiskit is an open-source project and isn't as intimately linked with IBM products as of yet.

Anyways more to the point, as commercial quantum computing continues to ramp up and we see more and more quantum computing SDKs become available, I think that it would be prudent for QC.SE to have a policy on offering support for these projects (or do we already have a community agreed-upon stance here?). In particular, if qiskit users are being linked here from the qiskit site and then we are closing a lot of qiskit programming questions, I can understand some confusion from users, but perhaps this isn't our problem?

I just took a look at the related post Would it make sense for there to be a separate SE site for "quantum programming" or "quantum information software", versus quantum information theory? where the more basic quantum software vs. the theory of quantum computing was brought up. I guess many of the same discussion points exist there, but I wanted to highlight the specific issue of Qiskit linking their support directly to this site.

Answer 1

Anyways more to the point, as commercial quantum computing continues to ramp up and we see more and more quantum computing SDKs become available, I think that it would be prudent for QC.SE to have a policy on offering support for these projects (or do we already have a community agreed-upon stance here?). In particular, if qiskit users are being linked here from the qiskit site and then we are closing a lot of qiskit programming questions, I can understand some confusion from users, but perhaps this isn't our problem?

I don't think we ever stated that this site "offers support to these projects", in the sense of being some kind of "official" place to go ask questions about them. But I agree that when the site is linked under the "support" section on a third-party project, people will get that impression, and be confused when they maybe get their question asked here as off-topic.

Qiskit's website having links pointing here is not bad per se, but the problem is if it put there in a way that makes this appear as the place where to ask questions about the software, whereas that sort of thing is better served with a dedicated forum in my opinion, as many, say, machine-learning open source projects use nowadays (https://discuss.pytorch.org/ to name just one example).

So to answer the titular question: I don't think we should serve any support role for any such project. What is or isn't allowed should be decided exclusively on the basis of what this community wants for this site. If a category of questions that are on-topic also makes this a good place to ask questions related to whatever project, that's great! Otherwise, such questions should be simply closed as off-topic.