Would civicrm.stackexchange.com be useful?

[artfulrobot.com]

Stack Exchange is a set of Q&A sites. I have found it an amazing resource. It's like a forum except that


• Questions are easier to find, tag
• Answers can be voted up and down; best ones rise to top
• Questions can be voted up and down; deters RTM type questions; rewards well researched questionners; saves community time answering dumb questions
• When you start a question an instant search shows similar questions - reduces duplicate questions
• Answers can be commented on and edited - means back-and-forth chit chat is separate from the important information: the answer. Makes it much easier to see the best outcome(s) from a question, instead of having to wade through pages of text to find out whether a particular post is useful
• An genius points and badges based system helps increase contributions, and maintains a quality. So for example, you can't vote an answer up/down until you have earned a reputation for knowing what you're talking about, which you might do by asking good questions, or having an answer of yours voted up. Ditto comments.
  

They run sites for different topics, ranging from Drupal, Database Admins, programming through to English Usage!

They will start a new site if a community shows that the desire exists. I think it could be a really good resource for the CiviCRM community, so I have proposed one.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40645/civicrm

If you think it's a good idea, please help it get launched: visit that link, "follow" the proposal you may need to set up account  - 2 mins, and well worth it!), add example questions on it, vote up example questions that you think are useful examples, tweet about it etc. It's a long road to showing enough support to Make It Happen.

As I said, I have found these sites an invaluable source of support and reference. I do not in any way mean to dis' or undervalue the excellent work put into this forum by the CiviCRM devs, and I suggest this in a spirit of wanting to help the community do this stuff more effectively and efficiently.

[Kevin Field]

These sites are excellent and quite helpful.  Users of the CiviCRM Community Forums should definitely check it out.

[Michael McAndrew]

they are definitely awesome.  i wonder if there are any tools out there to help with migration of forum content to stack exchange like content since it would be a shame to 'loose' this info.  Or maybe we should not worry about that. What did Drupal and others do?

[kreynen]

The original Area 51 proposal has been deleted because "Inactive proposals that do not receive any activity for one month are subject to deletion".  Drupal.org did not stop using the forums or issue queues when http://drupal.stackexchange.com/ launched.  In general the people running Drupal.org are reluctant to move anything to a service they don't have 100% control over.  There seems to be less of that POV in the CiviCRM community, but replacing even some of the forums with a Stack Exchange would require a coordinated effort to get enough activity that they'd move beyond the Area 51 state.

[artfulrobot.com]

Yeah, it was worth a punt. I find the SE format much more efficient than forums (I'm pretty sure the devs would, too, although as you say, it's an extra thing), and I just thought that it might be more accessible/inviting, too. Anyway, as you say, it got so far but lacked the critical mass required to get it off the ground. Was just an idea.

[Chris Burgess]

For Drupal, it was a matter of scale - there were enough people who found the forums (as opposed to issue queues) on d.o lacking that the SE site took off. I think CiviCRM would struggle to reach the level of activity required on SE, and I think that while the forum format isn't as good as SE format, the CiviCRM forums are substantially better value than Drupal forums were.

For me the difference is really about the community - CiviCRM community is much more engaged; the Drupal forums contain a lot more users who are "dipping their toes" and don't stick around long enough to engage properly. Opinion!

NB: Forums != issue queues. Just to be clear

[artfulrobot.com]

Great to see that this is on the cards again! Stack Exchange Q&A site proposal: CiviCRM http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/77367/civicrm?referrer=fmdHfn4OYrRJj1f1VHuVwA2

[Chris Burgess]

I think this could be of benefit - I still am not confident that we have the scale to pull it off, but I do think the platform of stackexchange is superior to the SMF in use on forum.Civicrm.Org so I'm happy to give the attempt the support I can!