Joel Spolsky has recently started a technology centred community forum. It is interesting, not because it is an entirely new concept, but because it is an improvement over existing forums.
Online forums have existed for several years. The first instance of it were the usenet groups and Bulletin Board Systems(BBSes). Archived posts on mailing lists have also served as a repository of collective experience. Then we had website forums powered by web based software like phpBB or Yahoo! Answers.
The problem, as Joel has noted, has been the level of difficulty at finding useful, relevant answers to a question. If I’m very lucky, I might find the answer after spending a lot of time googling or someone might respond with a useful answer to a query I post online. I know all about that since I’ve spent several frustrating hours recently trying to work out why (1) the wireless on X41 Thinkpad can’t get an IP from the wireless router and connect to the Internet. My flatmate has a Dell laptop and I’ve successfully configured her laptop for wireless internet access. (2) I can run a Remote Desktop and VNC connection on my desktop from within the local network and I can connect locally to the VPN server on the modem-router, a Billion 7404VGO-M but can’t connect to the same services remotely.
I’ve hunted for answers on forums only to encounter the exact questions but no answers. And usually only after googling with different search terms. I’ve found someone asking a similar question on a forum, but seeing the replies requires paying for a subscription (experts exchange, for example) and I’m hardly convinced that I’ll get my money’s worth if I did subscribe to their site. Sometimes I’ve managed to find a forum or mailing list thread that looked potentially useful, but I have had to trawl through the crud and spam just to dig up the gem, no matter how small the smidgeon of a gem it might be.
So how is StackOverflow different from the other existing community forums out there? It is somewhat user regulated as people can vote up or down answers. Tagging also makes finding similar questions easier to find by topic. Of course, not all the issues have been ironed out yet but I think it is worth a look at.
