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[chmod]

Hello Community!

I was sitting at DevDays today downtown in Seattle. And Joel Spolsky announced that the framework which runs http://stackoverflow.com was being offered as a white label solution for a free beta, I wanted to try it out for DF immediately.

So here it is, a site I spent about 10 minutes creating as an experiment to see if it would catch on in our community which is rife with questions, and hopefully rife with answers

You can use OpenId to login, and chances are you already have an account that would work on this site. It is just a beta so all I intend to do with this is prove the concept and see if it's something that we could adopt in the future. The last thing I'm trying to do is step on someone's toes.

Hey, it's a free beta from some of the best devs in the industry, so let's give it a whirl.

You can try it out here: http://df.stackexchange.com

[Capntastic]

'Dear Amrok'

Lookin' to see if this thing blossoms or not.

[smjjames]

Ya mispelled armok dude.......

[chmod]

Ya mispelled armok dude.......

Was a typo. Fixed.

[smjjames]

Ya mispelled armok dude.......

Was a typo. Fixed.

I was talking to Captntastic though.

[Capntastic]

Ya mispelled armok dude.......

Was a typo. Fixed.

I was talking to Captntastic though.

And I was pointing out the typo he fixed.

[chmod]

Ya mispelled armok dude.......

Was a typo. Fixed.

I was talking to Captntastic though.

And I was pointing out the typo he fixed.

So about the site... hehe. Any opinions so far?

[Sinergistic]

Ya mispelled armok dude.......

Was a typo. Fixed.

I was talking to Captntastic though.

And I was pointing out the typo he fixed.

So about the site... hehe. Any opinions so far?

Well, it had a type that got fixed pretty fast... seems cool enough.

[martinuzz]

While I must encourage your enthousiasm, I fail to see any added value in having a seperate, extra page for questions and answers. I don't say it looks bad. Not at all, for 10 minutes work.

However, this forum's gameplay questions section offers new and old players an environment where questions are answered pretty fast, and also, doubtful answers are debated / corrected most of the time by the community.
This is mainly thanks to the sheer numbers of DF players that frequent the forums.
Any new, seperate question forum would start out with the disadvantage of not yet having such a stable foundation. Wrongful answers will probably not be corrected that fast, if at all, which can lead to confusion.

Apart from that, there is the wiki. In my opinion, your enthousiasm would be better used, and appreciated, if you were to scout for answered questions that are not yet in the wiki, and add those to it. The wiki is useful, but only because of the players' input. It needs people like you to make it even better! 

[orbcontrolled]

The smaller the community, the worse an idea it is to split people amongst multiple sites. Lets wait until we outgrow the forums, then we can think about expanding.

[chmod]

While I must encourage your enthousiasm, I fail to see any added value in having a seperate, extra page for questions and answers. I don't say it looks bad. Not at all, for 10 minutes work.

However, this forum's gameplay questions section offers new and old players an environment where questions are answered pretty fast, and also, doubtful answers are debated / corrected most of the time by the community.
This is mainly thanks to the sheer numbers of DF players that frequent the forums.
Any new, seperate question forum would start out with the disadvantage of not yet having such a stable foundation. Wrongful answers will probably not be corrected that fast, if at all, which can lead to confusion.

Apart from that, there is the wiki. In my opinion, your enthousiasm would be better used, and appreciated, if you were to scout for answered questions that are not yet in the wiki, and add those to it. The wiki is useful, but only because of the players' input. It needs people like you to make it even better! 

I agree with most of your points, but I think Stack Overflow has stumbled upon something that we will see in 5 years as the game-changer for this type of communication. Forums tend to have horrible search features, and a static hierarchy. Wikis have a high-barrier to entry in that only about 1% of wiki users will ever actually add to it.

You add to this equation, a very simple method to ask questions and organize them. You get up-voted and accepted answers, thus gaining reputation. Reputation is the carrot on a stick that tends to make these sites explode in usage. It's true that the site could be seen as some sort of competition to the wiki and forums, but it's just a better tool for asking questions. The forums are a great place to have conversations, but due to their serial-nature you end up with several "subthreads" in each thread.

Do you really think a 300 page Future of the Fort thread is the best way to organize all those questions? Hell no it's not.

[GlyphGryph]

I just want to thank you for pointing out this stack overflow thing - I'm not sure if its really needed for DF (we have a high quality wiki and a good Q+A forum) but I could see it being useful.

but I think I might set one up for some of the other less popular games I play and see how it goes for those.

[AtomicPaperclip]

Well, it might help with my frustration of people asking basic questions in the Fortress mode forum, and saying I'M NOT SURE IF THIS IS THE RIGHT FORUM, like they can't be assed to read a few topic names

[chmod]

Well it's got a few more questions on there, just need more folks pointing to it.

[father_alexander]

i said what i think about it on the site, but ill repeat myself here, i think this can be an awesome tool, and if not, then hell an interesting experiment, lets just hope it lives