For those who don’t know Stack Overflow, I recommend having a look round. Web Forums (Fora?) done right. A sensible and easy way of rating questions and answers and questioners and answerers. For the right subjects, a goodly group of knowledgeable people answering them… But mainly on a software theme. Sadly (for me :) FPGAs and HDLs only come up occasionally (but I try and answer when I can). Enter Stack Exchange:
The best place (IMHO) for FPGA advice currently is Usenet. comp.arch.fpga and comp.lang.vhdl have a group of experts who are happy to help with well-asked questions. But the signal:noise ratio is dropping of late. My guess is that this is because new users tend to go for web forums which tend to be single vendor and don’t have the variety of experts that the newsgroups do. And, for some reason, they seem to attract poorly phrased questions.
Stackoverflow and its sister Stack Exchange are designed for the web forum generation, and do it well.
There’s a group up for creation on stack exchange related to FPGAs, but it needs a bunch more people to express interest before it can come into existence. I’d like to see it flourish, and if it comes to reality, I’ll be checking the questions regularly, and maybe posting a few of my own.
(Mind, I’ll always hang out on comp.arch.fpga as well though)