Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
stackoverflow-like site for DC. Would it work? Now free
urlwolf:
We discussed before whether a stackoverflow-like site would work for DC. To summarize the thread, it seemed that (1) some people were against any score of any kind and (2) it's not clear what makes SO work, and how to import it to DC without killing the 'around the water cooler' conversation. But mostly everyone agreed that there's something working there that beats forum software.
Would it work here? Well, now is the best time to try since they just made SO's software free (and hosted to boot! I know that mouser pays quite a lot for the servers that run this forum)
Basically, they make it free (but with some hoops). This is good news in that they see the model extending to other communities. For a contrarian vision see most comments here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1263083
Note that if we wanted a self-hosted solution, there are FOSS clones out there, see http://shapado.com/
What do you think?
wraith808:
There's also OSQA - http://www.osqa.net/. The thing I see wrong about using a hosted version like StackExchange is that you have to propose the idea, then it seems that you have minimal control over the site. Not sure how that's going to work- I'd think a self-hosted version would be better.
mouser:
I think the model works fantastically for what they use it for, for focused question+answers by experts. But we are much more conversational here, so i'm not sure it would be a good match.. and i don't know how you could combine them.
wraith808:
I think it could be combined. Sometimes people come for an answer to a question and don't really know where to post it, and aren't necessarily out to spur conversation; other times people come to the site to spur conversation- not necessarily for an answer. Keep the current forum the way it is, but just like you have other subdomains, have answers.donationcoder.com (or something to that effect), and run that in this fashion for more of a Q&A.
housetier:
But sometimes one changes into the other: asking how to implement an Enterprise XML-Event Dispatcher Pattern Factory Framework in Powershell can lead to programming veterans to muse about the good ole times when the internets where still made of wood.
And that is precisely what I like about DC: there are still humans interacting with each other normally and freely.
While I often turn to SO for answers that other people must have asked before, I also see it as a "give me answer or give me death" sort of thing. It is focused so much. As this model works extremely well, I don't see how to combine SO and DC.
Say for example we move to have the Q&As on donationoverflow.com, and the nice discussions on good ol DC: it would need discipline (where to post this?). Even when there is a supposedly easy linking system like [DC]post-id on donationcoder[/DC], [DO]post id on donationoverflow[/DO] between those two sites, it would make work.
However! I think it is worth trying! We could have non-programming questions only: how to herd ducklings, how to make the best Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, I have a knife and an old hose: how do I make a solar panel out of it...
So while I am skeptic I don't see the experiment as a waste of time :)
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version