StackOverflow For Any Topic 191
RobinH writes "StackOverflow, the successful question-and-answer website for programmers, is now over a year old and its top user has just passed 100,000 reputation points. Now one of the creators of StackOverflow, Joel Spolsky, and his company Fog Creek, are developing a software-as-a-service form of the StackOverflow engine called StackExchange to support any topic you want. The software is currently in private beta, but the first few beta sites have surfaced. Topics include business travel, the home, parenthood, the environment, finance, and iPhone game development."
Re:Good job, too (Score:1, Interesting)
It should be interesting to see how well or how badly such a system will handle questions on topics such as parenting. It seems to me that parenting advice is less like programming, where there's often clear right and wrong answers, and more like religion where the right answer competes against everybody else's right answer. It seems like the perfect environment in which to observe that the wisdom of crowds also has its antithesis: the stupidity of crowds.
Too bad StackOverflow sucks. (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, what mouth-breather decided you should only be able to search tags instead of a full-text search?
It's also likely that the apparent (I've only skimmed the site) quality of the questions and answers there are because of the subject matter. What works for programming questions probably won't work for a lot of other domains -- just look at the dreck that is wiki.answers.com, yahoo answers etc.
Re:Too bad StackOverflow sucks. (Score:5, Interesting)
That'll be why it never comes up on searches.
90% of the time if I have to hit google for answers it's because something is giving a stupid error message (google for the message text) or error code (google for the number.. that can be fun..). Keywords won't cut it, because they assume I know what the problem is already (and if I knew that I'd hit the documentation and work it out myself).
The average BB experience is TERRIBLE (Score:3, Interesting)
Even the commercially supported and very expensive ones are *terrible*. They're full of distracting and useless information, their design is full of lines and tables and outlines that serve no purpose whatsoever, they don't present information in a sensible manner (usually signatures, dates, names and navigation take 5 times more space than the actual messages, for instance), and they just simply suck.
Look at stackoverflow. What do you see? Pure information. Navigation is the bare minimum. There is no useless labels. Things work as expected, along the principle of least surprise. The site is snappy. It uses Ajax where it's useful, not for the sake of it. It uses OpenID. It does tag quite well. The wiki markup is one of the most sensible around, and the editor is the best trade-off I've seen between unreadable markup and slow, clunky wysiwyg.
Re:The average BB experience is TERRIBLE (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I like Stack Overflow (Score:3, Interesting)
When there are a dozen open source CMS packages, and countless other sites charging nothing or very little for monthly fees for similar functionality
Show me
Actually yes, it's easily worth that (Score:3, Interesting)
How much would you pay? For this forum / QA software?
With Stack Exchange? A THOUSAND DOLLARS A MONTH.
If I felt like I had an idea that would have a good community around it, yes. StackOverflow is simply the best forum software I have ever used for a site oriented around questions and answers (for general discussion I do not think it would work as well, for instance it could not replace Slashdot). The motivational system between badges and voting and scores is well thought out, the software works really well on whatever browser I use it on, and the site has remained very stable even under heavy load.
After having used it for a while, and having developed server side software for a long time, I know the amount of work it would take to replicate all the good things Stack Overflow would be tremendous, and frankly I'm not sure I could really improve on it.
There's nothing wrong with paying for quality and a proven solution. Something is only "expensive" if it provides no value for what you pay.
I'm not sure if all the stack exchange ideas are really winners, but if I had something that I felt would work well I would not hesitate to use that as a solution - and furthermore I would hesitate to build any solution going against an equivalent Stack Exchange site.
Re:There is a better site (Score:3, Interesting)
Umm, stackoverflow is free; and doesnt bomb Google with it's completely obnoxious results.