Over time, I’ve reluctantly come to terms with the fact that a lot of questions and answers about curl is not done on the mailing lists we have setup in the project itself.

A primary such external site with curl related questions is of course stackoverflow – hardly news to programmers of today. The questions tagged with curl is of course only a very tiny fraction of the vast amount of questions and answers that accumulate on that busy site.

The pile of questions tagged with curl on stackoverflow has just surpassed the staggering number of 25,000. Of course, these questions involve persons who ask about particular curl behaviors (and a large portion is about PHP/CURL) but there’s also a significant amount of tags for questions where curl is only used to do something and that other something is actually what the question is about. And ‘libcurl’ is used as a separate tag and is often used independently of the ‘curl’ one. libcurl is tagged on almost 2,000 questions.

But still. 25,000 questions. Wow.

I visit that site every so often and answer to some questions but I often end up feeling a great “distance” between me and questions there, and I have a hard time to bridge that gap. Also, stackoverflow the site and the format isn’t really suitable for debugging or solving problems within curl so I often end up trying to get the user move over to file an issue on curl’s github page or discuss the curl problem on a mailing list instead. Forums more suitable for plenty of back-and-forth before the solution or fix is figured out.

Now, any bets for how long it takes until we reach 100K questions?