I don’t know how many people are familiar with StackOverflow and the changes it’s going through, this could be old news. But, it’s a site for questions/answers about technical issues. However, historically, the site creators have licensed the code for others to create more specialized QA sites (such as Astronomy, Cooking, Math, Games, etc).
Currently, the creators are changing things up again, and going to make new QA sites free. See What is StackExchange Doing?
I realize there’s a number of forums for Blender already, however StackExchange works a bit differently from forums. It’s based on voting for useful Answers (or good Questions), allowing for good answers to be more visible (and more permanent than a forum post which is back 20 pages).
I don’t know if there is any interested in the Blender community, in having a StackExchange site, but I thought it was at least worth mentioning.
Should enough people be interested, the proposal process is explained at: Stack Exchange
and starts at: Proposed Sites
John C>
“For all your days, prepare, and meet them ever alike;
When you are the anvil, bear - when the hammer, strike.”
+1, remember when I started learning there was the “blender knowledge base” lots of questions and answers, I went through most of them and it helped a lot to figure out blender early on.
Agree many things keep coming up again and again, so think this would be great to have though there is still a bit of overlap with blenderartist Q&A sections.
This can only be a good thing!
Even Search is a nice function in a forum, it hardly goes to the spot… reason for the all the repeted questions and their river of similar and yet not always accurate answers.
Sounds like a good idea. I find a lot of programming tips and solutions on StackExchange. That kind of format would be a good Q&A resource in addition to the forums.
FYI, I asked the StackOverflow Coordinate when they would be accepting proposals, and the reply was “The submit proposal function will be reactivated before the public beta is announced which should be within a few days”. Today is Monday 5/31/10, so maybe by next week…
John C>
“For all your days, prepare, and meet them ever alike;
When you are the anvil, bear - when the hammer, strike.”
We probably need something like this for Blender after Durian, I’d prefer it be Blender Foundation hosted though rather than relying on a random outside site.
StackExchange is now open for new Site proposals - should I propose a Blender site now? Or is there someone else who wants to (say, with more Blender rep than me ?
But is the Blender Foundation likely to host a Q&A site like StackOverflow? It’s a lot of work, and they’d either have find some open-source project similar to SO’s (there are a few) and get it working, or write their own.
And unrelated to that - it doesn’t seem there is a lot of support for a Q&A site. This topic only has 8 views, and it takes 60 people to follow a site for it to qualify.
John C>
“For all your days, prepare, and meet them ever alike;
When you are the anvil, bear - when the hammer, strike.”
But, it’s a site for questions/answers about technical issues. However, historically, the site creators have licensed the code for others to create more specialized QA sites (such as Astronomy, Cooking, Math, Games, etc).