I am the author of the app albert launcher and want to redirect users in the support channel to this site to ask or find questions. Can somebody please add the #albert, #albertlauncher or #albert-launcher tag. Personally I dont care but it would be nice to have one to be able to aggregate FAQs.

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    This not a support site for your software. Any issues with your program should be directed to your website. – DavidPostill Jun 2 at 20:03
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    I asked recently in the chat, and was assured that this is a perfect valid usecase. I mean there are no millions of users but several dozens of thousands. Aint that enough? – ManuelSchneid3r Jun 3 at 10:22

I've recognized developers of tmux, WinSCP, FFmpeg and GNU Parallel answering questions involving their software. Personally I think it's great developers provide support here (on Stack Exchange in general). If questions and answers meet our standards then they can stay.

I see nothing wrong in encouraging users of your software to ask here, unless they are legion and are going to take over the site by posting some enormous number of questions per day. In your case it seems we're safe; for now. :)

You should not present Super User to them as a support platform for your software, because it's not. Tell them the truth: it's a Q&A site where they can ask questions that are on-topic, which happen to include at least some questions about your software, I believe. They should know their questions can be answered and rated by other users, not only by you or your team. But you happen to be here for them.

It's up to you if you provide another channel of support. If played right, this one channel may be enough.

Note you have enough reputation to create a tag. Asking about some problem specific to your software and answering it may be a good start and an occasion to create a tag.

If you decide to do this, if you decide to support your users here, then keep in mind that:

  1. You should disclose your affiliation to the project, especially if you link to the project site.
  2. You should post standalone, high quality answers. E.g. just linking to your blog where the actual answer is would be wrong.
  3. You should not excessively promote your software. The fact it's free and open source will help in fighting charges stating that your posts are nothing but spam.

I can see you have years of experience on SE, you have already earned reputation here and there. Therefore the remarks below are probably unnecessary in your case. I'm including them here in case some other developer with similar idea reads this answer.

  1. You should follow the site rules. I remember one time I was involved in deleting few "answers" written by a developer. These were just asking for clarification and should have been posted as comments in the first place. The developer had enough reputation to post comments but kept arguing and kept posting non-answers instead of learning and accepting how the site works. Don't let this happen to you. In some cases you, as the developer, may be the only person in the world to provide a good answer; this doesn't mean we will bend our rules for you.
  2. It is a virtue to not restrict yourself to solving only problems with your software.

In other words your questions and answers should make the community believe you genuinely want to solve on-topic problems and help our users; not only your project, business, ego, CV or your whatever.

This is my opinion. Others may disagree. I think you should wait several days before you act. Fellow users will hopefully vote this answer up (if they agree) and down (if they disagree).

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  • Pretty much this. We don't have a problem with people having us host their support system, but it needs to be relevant and on-topic and follow the rules. My answer was more about why creating the tag without any existing posts is a bit counterproductive. – Mokubai Jun 4 at 18:18

This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation. You want to push users here for support, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you want everything set up first which we can't do.

The first time or in the first few times a questions are asked should be when the tag is created. If the tag is created without any questions to attach it to then it will simply get deleted when the various cleanup scripts run.

Initially though, you don't need the tag, if people are using the name of your software then that is enough, the search tool can help you initially, after that any user with some rep can create and add the tag.

If it were created but never used then it would have been a wasted effort, applying it to a few old questions is more proof that we do actually need it.

If you can show us questions where it should be applied then it would be a different situation.

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