10 ms·

StackExchange- The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform

135 points by rayvega 17y ago

zach 17y ago
This is great. I was hoping this would happen since so much microdocumentation is only ever shared between team members on large projects and is not easily available to new members. On the other hand, I guess the idea they mooted early on of going open source is dead now.
- rayvega 17y ago
  It seems that they still intend to open source it sometime in the future: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/35/will-stackoverflows-engine-be-open-sourced http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/35/will-stackoverflo...
robryan 17y ago
Hope this works out for them, great way to moneterize the platform without having the rely solely on a advertising supported business model.
tptacek 17y ago
I'm surprised/impressed at how quickly they're moving on this whole Stack Overflow concept. There are YC startups that don't seem to be as nimble as Atwood's team. What's the long-term relationship between Atwood and Fog Creek?
- nopassrecover 17y ago
  Spolsky and Atwood got talking after Atwood posted a criticism of Joel. I think they pretty quickly started working on this idea after that (I think Joel brought it up with Jeff).
- LargeWu 17y ago
  SO is only, I think, 3 programmers including Atwood. So I should hope they're nimble. Why they should be any less nimble than a YC startup would never even occur to me. Spolsky is really more of a silent partner in this (maybe not so silent publicly, but the impression I get from their podcasts is that he is involved only on the business end).
  - pchristensen 17y ago
    Many people in this community think Atwood is a retard because he writes about stuff he's not an expert in, and because he uses Microsoft products. I venture to guess that many people here think he's not of the caliber of programmer that YC invests in. He has clearly proven them wrong.
    - dinkumthinkum 17y ago
      To be fair, a lot of the success comes from the size of the audience of him and Joel.
      - jm4 17y ago
        There's no doubt access to a large audience helped get some publicity and users early on. But to be fair, Stack Overflow worked well and was useful on day one. We've seen startups basically fold on the first day when things don't go smoothly. The site crumbles under load. There's no content on a user-generated-content site. Maybe the thing flat out doesn't work as advertised. Some of them eventually overcome these problems only to be ridiculed for it over the next year. The Stack Overflow launch was handled incredibly well. I would attribute their success to much more than the size of their audience.
      - slpsys 17y ago
        That's not being fair, that's being contrary. If StackOverflow was a stupid idea or poorly executed, no one would use it. Yes, they announced it from a pretty tall pulpit, but if no one cared what either of them had to say--for or against--no one would care to read their blogs, either.
        dinkumthinkum 17y ago
        Sure, it's being fair. Before we go off and pronounce that "Jeff Atwood has proven everyone wrong," let's keep a few things in mind. Also, having a lot of readership does not prove someone is a top shelf programmer. To be honest, this is not even something that Joel and, perhaps, Jeff haven't said themselves.
- johns 17y ago
  StackExchange is a product of Fog Creek. The end-user sites (SO, serverfault.com and superuser.com) are a joint venture. I assume the deal was that Fog Creek got rights to the hosted version in exchange for funding the development of the end-user sites.
stuntgoat 17y ago
Anyone know of plans for non-profit or educational use? I imagine the folks trying to cure diseases or solve environmental problems could use a tool like this.
ankhmoop 17y ago
Until I clicked on the link, I was excited, as the comments on monetization lead me think they might be providing a marketplace for me to provide for-fee answers to users. Unfortunately, this is not the case. As it is, I don't bother to use StackOverflow. My questions would be too esoteric for the audience/format, and nearly all of the questions I see are boring, easily answerable with a search of the documentation. The questions would be less boring if I were paid to answer them, and then I'd be more likely to find a few gems to answer, too.
- guns 17y ago
  How much money would make it worth your time? If your expertise is too high / too esoteric for the StackOverflow community, then you should command high prices in the marketplace. It's doubtful to me that you could appeal to expert users to exchange time for money when it is better leveraged by consulting and entrepreneurship. This topic comes up quite often on the StackOverflow podcast.
  - ankhmoop 17y ago
    How much money would make it worth your time? If your expertise is too high / too esoteric for the StackOverflow community, then you should command high prices in the marketplace. $5-$15 per answer would be reasonable given the limited time involvement. It's doubtful to me that you could appeal to expert users to exchange time for money when it is better leveraged by consulting and entrepreneurship. I seem to have enough free time to blow a fair portion of it commenting on Hacker News.
    - thorax 17y ago
      Keep money per answer out of this. It's amazing what happens when you keep a site like SO working on social norms and avoiding market norms. To understand how powerful this difference can be, this book is an eye-opener (outlined here): http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/Predictably-Irrational http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/Predictably-Irrational
      - 17y ago
vaksel 17y ago
is it me or is it a little bit pricey in the mid range? 1 million page views is nothing, and then you are stuck in a $999 plan without actual traction to monetize. And there is no reason to be stuck on a $999 plan on a shared server, if for $300 bucks more you can get unlimited + dedicated server. Seems like the $999 plan should be $499 instead, and the $1299 plan should be $999. And come to think of it, the pricing seems pretty high. Let's face it, the software is very simple and could be duplicated very quickly. Why pay $999/mo, when you can have a few hackers code it up in a couple of weeks for a few grand. Hell, someone should do it here, would be a decent startup idea, copy them, but charge $29.99/$59.99/$99.99 for your plans.
- patio11 17y ago
  Why pay $999/mo, when you can have a few hackers code it up in a couple of weeks for a few grand. The long road of our industry is littered with the corpses of projects which would only take a few programmers a couple of weeks to program. But technical risk isn't the big worry here for a startup. Hell, someone should do it here, would be a decent startup idea, copy them, but charge $29.99/$59.99/$99.99 for your plans. That hypothetical startup would be: a) Trying to market the product without having a successful reference implementation available and without having Joel & Jeff to bootstrap the reference implementation. b) Be aimed squarely at the low end of the market. (i.e. penny-pinching pathological customers rather than enterprises for whom $1,000 is inconsequentially cheap if it brings projects in on time) This buys you some very fun customer support duties. c) Need to sell minimally several dozen companies on a quirky knowledge-base type product per FTE they wanted to support. d) Get to compete on search advertising with someone who can afford to outspend them ten-to-one for customer acquisition.
  - vaksel 17y ago
    The first part, I wasn't talking about building it. I was talking about a customer, who is stuck paying $999-2500 a month, for a product that can be built by a few programmers in a few weeks. That hypothetical startup wouldn't need to give customer service. You want customer service and like paying large fees? Go to stackexchange, you want a working solution at a huge discount? You come to the hypothetical startup. Basically its the case of Stackexchange playing the role of a big pricey inbred company, and you giving them the 34signals option
ktharavaad 17y ago
Seems really pricey for a relatively simple software like this. Someone write an opensource alternative? it looks like something that can be thrown together in a weekend.
- LargeWu 17y ago
  A lot of what makes Stack Overflow successful is the amount of effort they've put into making a great user experience. That's not the sort of thing you just come up with in a weekend. It's a continual process that requires a lot of attention. And let's face it, open source's strong point generally isn't in engineering good user experience.
  - jonknee 17y ago
    I think it's more that it was launched by two really well known (by programmers) programmers. Exposure is everything.
  - davidw 17y ago
    When I first saw it, I liked the clean look and feel, but hated the "DAVE, I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT" approach to permissions with regards to comments, votes, and the like. As a beginning user, you had (have? don't know if they've changed it) all these links and buttons that are displayed, but don't let you do anything; they just give you a lame message about requiring N gold stars before you can do that.
    - easyfrag 17y ago
      "Dave, I can't let you do that?" You do know that SO allows questions and answers from people without even requiring them to log in? They allow content from essentially anonymous users. The restrictions are along the "meta" parts (voting to indicate the quality of an answer), I think it is entirely sensible to restrict these actions to users who have built up a currency of trust within the SO community. That being said, I think you are onto to something around the user experience. Perhaps an option shouldn't be shown to someone if they cannot perform it.
orph 17y ago
Here is a half-completed django implementation of StackOverflow called soclone: http://code.google.com/p/soclone/ http://code.google.com/p/soclone/. No changes since 2008 though.
- patio11 17y ago
  I think this is going in my next essay about OSS vs. proprietary software. Proprietary software: OK, so technically it both exists and works, but it costs money. OSS: It has only had one man-week of labor in it. The software is not feature complete. However, if it actually worked, it would be awesome because you'd be able to browse your corporate knowledge base on your Wii. Also, it would support browsers without Javascript, because your office is cool and lets workers change things like that. Successful open source projects -- the ones you use, the ones you love, the ones you have heard of -- are the exception. Projects like this are the rule.
  - tharris7 17y ago
    Perhaps OSS is stronger because of this phenomenom: only the best projects survive (the ones worth people spending their own time on). Whereas in propietary software, it's up to the bosses what gets made and developers to get paid.
  - patcito 17y ago
    > Successful proprietary software -- the ones you use, the ones you love, the ones you have heard of -- are the exception. Projects like this are the rule. FTFY. In other words, most software suck and fail, open source or not, welcome to reality. Also, here is a full working clone of stackoverflow http://code.google.com/p/cnprog/ http://code.google.com/p/cnprog/ hosted here http://www.cnprog.com/ http://www.cnprog.com/
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - dinkumthinkum 17y ago
    That's not a very interesting observation. Part of the reason that successful open source projects are, presumably, statistically far less than unsuccessful ones is that the barrier to entry in order to start an open source project is basically non-existant. Any 12 year old who gets an idea for a game can put up a project on sourceforge. However, proprietary software has steeper barrier. Typically, it comes from people in an established company if not an entrenched bureaucracy. It's more interesting to choose projects that have achieved certain milestones (beyond one man-week of labor as you put it). As well, there are plenty of proprietary projects that have failed and you have never heard of and never will. Data about failed proprietary projects is much more difficult to find. However, open source projects are almost entirely transparent about that kind of thing.
10ren 17y ago
Their terms are so good (45 day free trial, immediate cancel & refund at any time), that I wish I had a use for it that justified the price. Even as a user-support for a software product, it would be cool. Probably cheaper, if you have serious support costs - for example, that (possibly fake) Gates article quoted $500 million per year in support costs. Saving a fraction of that is worth the costs quoted. I'm sure it's similar for other big corporations - and even for internal use. As for price, you'd be amazed at what corporations will pay for solutions to their problems. This is because you'd be amazed at how much their problems cost them.
blasdel 17y ago
The segmentation between 'shared' and 'dedicated' hosting is bizarre -- aren't you paying them not to have to care about that? Furthermore, it leads me to think poorly of their software -- did they really manage to fuck up something as embarrassingly parallel as responding to HTTP Requests? Maybe it's just that their MS toolchain is ignorant of the possibility...
- DrJokepu 17y ago
  There's nothing bizarre with it in my opinion - it's easy to understand, even for non-technical people, who are likely to make the decision at Big Enterprise whether to buy Plan A or Plan B. I don't see how a marketing decision such as this could give any insight into the efficiency and quality of their implementation of HTTP request handling.
gojomo 17y ago
I think this is a great idea. My questions as a potential user would be: (1) How much visual customization will be supported? (2) I won't have to make people use OpenID, will I? (3) Does the Fog Creek/Atwood team plan more verticals that I might inadvertently find myself competing against?
- billpg 17y ago
  #include "i love openid and so should you. here's some arguments that probably didn't convince you last time you heard them.txt"
jp2506 17y ago
http://www.cigarettes-home.com/ http://www.cigarettes-home.com/ http://www.cigarettes-sky.com/ http://www.cigarettes-sky.com/
hopeless 17y ago
I've long thought that a StackOverflow for photographers would be a great resource... but not a business. Unfortunately, the StackExchange pricing assumes that you will be a revenue-generating because no one can justify $129/month on running a free resource.
- chaosmachine 17y ago
  Photographers are actually a really monetizable audience compared to most. Sign up with the right affiliate program, and a single sale could cover that $129.
- callmeed 17y ago
  I was thinking the same thing ... but I think you could monetize it ... at least I think I could (by putting links to our products on the side, I could make up the hosting cost easily).
pibefision 17y ago
The software is excelent, but the pricing fails. Supose that i'e an idea to build a community using StackExchange. How can I monetize it to pay U$S999 a month once I pass 1mm pageviews? It's quite hard!
lut4rp 17y ago
I'd say its possible to do this using Drupal in 2 weeks. Oh, wait, did you say "3" talented developers? Please, less than a week then. Drupal already has ready-made modules for this type of functionality. All you need is to throw 'em together. The price is too high, sorry.
- decadentcactus 17y ago
  Oh ok. Come back in a week with your site that parallels SO in features and activity then. And "I'm too busy working on other projects" doesn't count as an excuse.
  - lut4rp 17y ago
    Yes, it does count here. I'm working with Google Summer of Code 2009 right now. And incidentally, my project is related to voting :-)
bayareaguy 17y ago
Anyone want to guess how long it will take for Microsoft SharePoint to copy this interface?
favaron 17y ago
http://www.askdev.ru/ http://www.askdev.ru/ - russian clone, not bad.

135 points by rayvega 17y ago

zach 17y ago

This is great. I was hoping this would happen since so much microdocumentation is only ever shared between team members on large projects and is not easily available to new members. On the other hand, I guess the idea they mooted early on of going open source is dead now.

rayvega 17y ago
It seems that they still intend to open source it sometime in the future: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/35/will-stackoverflows-engine-be-open-sourced http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/35/will-stackoverflo...

robryan 17y ago

Hope this works out for them, great way to moneterize the platform without having the rely solely on a advertising supported business model.

tptacek 17y ago

I'm surprised/impressed at how quickly they're moving on this whole Stack Overflow concept. There are YC startups that don't seem to be as nimble as Atwood's team. What's the long-term relationship between Atwood and Fog Creek?

nopassrecover 17y ago
Spolsky and Atwood got talking after Atwood posted a criticism of Joel. I think they pretty quickly started working on this idea after that (I think Joel brought it up with Jeff).
LargeWu 17y ago
SO is only, I think, 3 programmers including Atwood. So I should hope they're nimble. Why they should be any less nimble than a YC startup would never even occur to me. Spolsky is really more of a silent partner in this (maybe not so silent publicly, but the impression I get from their podcasts is that he is involved only on the business end).
- pchristensen 17y ago
  Many people in this community think Atwood is a retard because he writes about stuff he's not an expert in, and because he uses Microsoft products. I venture to guess that many people here think he's not of the caliber of programmer that YC invests in. He has clearly proven them wrong.
  - dinkumthinkum 17y ago
    To be fair, a lot of the success comes from the size of the audience of him and Joel.
    - jm4 17y ago
      There's no doubt access to a large audience helped get some publicity and users early on. But to be fair, Stack Overflow worked well and was useful on day one. We've seen startups basically fold on the first day when things don't go smoothly. The site crumbles under load. There's no content on a user-generated-content site. Maybe the thing flat out doesn't work as advertised. Some of them eventually overcome these problems only to be ridiculed for it over the next year. The Stack Overflow launch was handled incredibly well. I would attribute their success to much more than the size of their audience.
    - slpsys 17y ago
      That's not being fair, that's being contrary. If StackOverflow was a stupid idea or poorly executed, no one would use it. Yes, they announced it from a pretty tall pulpit, but if no one cared what either of them had to say--for or against--no one would care to read their blogs, either.
      - dinkumthinkum 17y ago
        Sure, it's being fair. Before we go off and pronounce that "Jeff Atwood has proven everyone wrong," let's keep a few things in mind. Also, having a lot of readership does not prove someone is a top shelf programmer. To be honest, this is not even something that Joel and, perhaps, Jeff haven't said themselves.
johns 17y ago
StackExchange is a product of Fog Creek. The end-user sites (SO, serverfault.com and superuser.com) are a joint venture. I assume the deal was that Fog Creek got rights to the hosted version in exchange for funding the development of the end-user sites.

stuntgoat 17y ago

Anyone know of plans for non-profit or educational use? I imagine the folks trying to cure diseases or solve environmental problems could use a tool like this.

ankhmoop 17y ago

Until I clicked on the link, I was excited, as the comments on monetization lead me think they might be providing a marketplace for me to provide for-fee answers to users. Unfortunately, this is not the case. As it is, I don't bother to use StackOverflow. My questions would be too esoteric for the audience/format, and nearly all of the questions I see are boring, easily answerable with a search of the documentation. The questions would be less boring if I were paid to answer them, and then I'd be more likely to find a few gems to answer, too.

guns 17y ago
How much money would make it worth your time? If your expertise is too high / too esoteric for the StackOverflow community, then you should command high prices in the marketplace. It's doubtful to me that you could appeal to expert users to exchange time for money when it is better leveraged by consulting and entrepreneurship. This topic comes up quite often on the StackOverflow podcast.
- ankhmoop 17y ago
  How much money would make it worth your time? If your expertise is too high / too esoteric for the StackOverflow community, then you should command high prices in the marketplace. $5-$15 per answer would be reasonable given the limited time involvement. It's doubtful to me that you could appeal to expert users to exchange time for money when it is better leveraged by consulting and entrepreneurship. I seem to have enough free time to blow a fair portion of it commenting on Hacker News.
  - thorax 17y ago
    Keep money per answer out of this. It's amazing what happens when you keep a site like SO working on social norms and avoiding market norms. To understand how powerful this difference can be, this book is an eye-opener (outlined here): http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/Predictably-Irrational http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/Predictably-Irrational
    - 17y ago

vaksel 17y ago

is it me or is it a little bit pricey in the mid range? 1 million page views is nothing, and then you are stuck in a $999 plan without actual traction to monetize. And there is no reason to be stuck on a $999 plan on a shared server, if for $300 bucks more you can get unlimited + dedicated server. Seems like the $999 plan should be $499 instead, and the $1299 plan should be $999. And come to think of it, the pricing seems pretty high. Let's face it, the software is very simple and could be duplicated very quickly. Why pay $999/mo, when you can have a few hackers code it up in a couple of weeks for a few grand. Hell, someone should do it here, would be a decent startup idea, copy them, but charge $29.99/$59.99/$99.99 for your plans.

patio11 17y ago
Why pay $999/mo, when you can have a few hackers code it up in a couple of weeks for a few grand. The long road of our industry is littered with the corpses of projects which would only take a few programmers a couple of weeks to program. But technical risk isn't the big worry here for a startup. Hell, someone should do it here, would be a decent startup idea, copy them, but charge $29.99/$59.99/$99.99 for your plans. That hypothetical startup would be: a) Trying to market the product without having a successful reference implementation available and without having Joel & Jeff to bootstrap the reference implementation. b) Be aimed squarely at the low end of the market. (i.e. penny-pinching pathological customers rather than enterprises for whom $1,000 is inconsequentially cheap if it brings projects in on time) This buys you some very fun customer support duties. c) Need to sell minimally several dozen companies on a quirky knowledge-base type product per FTE they wanted to support. d) Get to compete on search advertising with someone who can afford to outspend them ten-to-one for customer acquisition.
- vaksel 17y ago
  The first part, I wasn't talking about building it. I was talking about a customer, who is stuck paying $999-2500 a month, for a product that can be built by a few programmers in a few weeks. That hypothetical startup wouldn't need to give customer service. You want customer service and like paying large fees? Go to stackexchange, you want a working solution at a huge discount? You come to the hypothetical startup. Basically its the case of Stackexchange playing the role of a big pricey inbred company, and you giving them the 34signals option

ktharavaad 17y ago

Seems really pricey for a relatively simple software like this. Someone write an opensource alternative? it looks like something that can be thrown together in a weekend.

LargeWu 17y ago
A lot of what makes Stack Overflow successful is the amount of effort they've put into making a great user experience. That's not the sort of thing you just come up with in a weekend. It's a continual process that requires a lot of attention. And let's face it, open source's strong point generally isn't in engineering good user experience.
- jonknee 17y ago
  I think it's more that it was launched by two really well known (by programmers) programmers. Exposure is everything.
- davidw 17y ago
  When I first saw it, I liked the clean look and feel, but hated the "DAVE, I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT" approach to permissions with regards to comments, votes, and the like. As a beginning user, you had (have? don't know if they've changed it) all these links and buttons that are displayed, but don't let you do anything; they just give you a lame message about requiring N gold stars before you can do that.
  - easyfrag 17y ago
    "Dave, I can't let you do that?" You do know that SO allows questions and answers from people without even requiring them to log in? They allow content from essentially anonymous users. The restrictions are along the "meta" parts (voting to indicate the quality of an answer), I think it is entirely sensible to restrict these actions to users who have built up a currency of trust within the SO community. That being said, I think you are onto to something around the user experience. Perhaps an option shouldn't be shown to someone if they cannot perform it.

orph 17y ago

Here is a half-completed django implementation of StackOverflow called soclone: http://code.google.com/p/soclone/ http://code.google.com/p/soclone/. No changes since 2008 though.

patio11 17y ago
I think this is going in my next essay about OSS vs. proprietary software. Proprietary software: OK, so technically it both exists and works, but it costs money. OSS: It has only had one man-week of labor in it. The software is not feature complete. However, if it actually worked, it would be awesome because you'd be able to browse your corporate knowledge base on your Wii. Also, it would support browsers without Javascript, because your office is cool and lets workers change things like that. Successful open source projects -- the ones you use, the ones you love, the ones you have heard of -- are the exception. Projects like this are the rule.
- tharris7 17y ago
  Perhaps OSS is stronger because of this phenomenom: only the best projects survive (the ones worth people spending their own time on). Whereas in propietary software, it's up to the bosses what gets made and developers to get paid.
- patcito 17y ago
  > Successful proprietary software -- the ones you use, the ones you love, the ones you have heard of -- are the exception. Projects like this are the rule. FTFY. In other words, most software suck and fail, open source or not, welcome to reality. Also, here is a full working clone of stackoverflow http://code.google.com/p/cnprog/ http://code.google.com/p/cnprog/ hosted here http://www.cnprog.com/ http://www.cnprog.com/
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- dinkumthinkum 17y ago
  That's not a very interesting observation. Part of the reason that successful open source projects are, presumably, statistically far less than unsuccessful ones is that the barrier to entry in order to start an open source project is basically non-existant. Any 12 year old who gets an idea for a game can put up a project on sourceforge. However, proprietary software has steeper barrier. Typically, it comes from people in an established company if not an entrenched bureaucracy. It's more interesting to choose projects that have achieved certain milestones (beyond one man-week of labor as you put it). As well, there are plenty of proprietary projects that have failed and you have never heard of and never will. Data about failed proprietary projects is much more difficult to find. However, open source projects are almost entirely transparent about that kind of thing.

10ren 17y ago

Their terms are so good (45 day free trial, immediate cancel & refund at any time), that I wish I had a use for it that justified the price. Even as a user-support for a software product, it would be cool. Probably cheaper, if you have serious support costs - for example, that (possibly fake) Gates article quoted $500 million per year in support costs. Saving a fraction of that is worth the costs quoted. I'm sure it's similar for other big corporations - and even for internal use. As for price, you'd be amazed at what corporations will pay for solutions to their problems. This is because you'd be amazed at how much their problems cost them.

blasdel 17y ago

The segmentation between 'shared' and 'dedicated' hosting is bizarre -- aren't you paying them not to have to care about that? Furthermore, it leads me to think poorly of their software -- did they really manage to fuck up something as embarrassingly parallel as responding to HTTP Requests? Maybe it's just that their MS toolchain is ignorant of the possibility...

DrJokepu 17y ago
There's nothing bizarre with it in my opinion - it's easy to understand, even for non-technical people, who are likely to make the decision at Big Enterprise whether to buy Plan A or Plan B. I don't see how a marketing decision such as this could give any insight into the efficiency and quality of their implementation of HTTP request handling.

gojomo 17y ago

I think this is a great idea. My questions as a potential user would be: (1) How much visual customization will be supported? (2) I won't have to make people use OpenID, will I? (3) Does the Fog Creek/Atwood team plan more verticals that I might inadvertently find myself competing against?

billpg 17y ago
#include "i love openid and so should you. here's some arguments that probably didn't convince you last time you heard them.txt"

jp2506 17y ago

http://www.cigarettes-home.com/ http://www.cigarettes-home.com/ http://www.cigarettes-sky.com/ http://www.cigarettes-sky.com/

hopeless 17y ago

I've long thought that a StackOverflow for photographers would be a great resource... but not a business. Unfortunately, the StackExchange pricing assumes that you will be a revenue-generating because no one can justify $129/month on running a free resource.

chaosmachine 17y ago
Photographers are actually a really monetizable audience compared to most. Sign up with the right affiliate program, and a single sale could cover that $129.
callmeed 17y ago
I was thinking the same thing ... but I think you could monetize it ... at least I think I could (by putting links to our products on the side, I could make up the hosting cost easily).

pibefision 17y ago

The software is excelent, but the pricing fails. Supose that i'e an idea to build a community using StackExchange. How can I monetize it to pay U$S999 a month once I pass 1mm pageviews? It's quite hard!

lut4rp 17y ago

I'd say its possible to do this using Drupal in 2 weeks. Oh, wait, did you say "3" talented developers? Please, less than a week then. Drupal already has ready-made modules for this type of functionality. All you need is to throw 'em together. The price is too high, sorry.

decadentcactus 17y ago
Oh ok. Come back in a week with your site that parallels SO in features and activity then. And "I'm too busy working on other projects" doesn't count as an excuse.
- lut4rp 17y ago
  Yes, it does count here. I'm working with Google Summer of Code 2009 right now. And incidentally, my project is related to voting :-)

bayareaguy 17y ago

Anyone want to guess how long it will take for Microsoft SharePoint to copy this interface?

favaron 17y ago

http://www.askdev.ru/ http://www.askdev.ru/ - russian clone, not bad.