Do you think we'll get the "closed as primarly opinion-based" flag squad on SO for Teams too?
Actually this brings up one of the things I like the most about this SO for Teams idea - it could also be used as a sort of slant.co substitute, where a large dev team is trying to settle on a common programming language or persistence framework, and each person can register their opinion or vote on an existing one.
After N days, the whole group decides to select the option with the most votes. Since voting is anonymous, everyone can give their honest opinion, or even vote for multiple.
If you don't like the "opinion-based" close reason, you can just not use it on your team.
My question is, is this better than your self-hosted wiki? At least that's cheaper and isn't a vendor lock-in. Sure wiki doesn't have the best possible UI and the UX might be too so-and-so. If I were in a position to buy this kind of service I'd still want something more out of it. Maybe if it offered a way to export Slack threads into SO as questions so they wouldn't get lost. Sure you could generate those questions…
Has there ever been a self-hosted wiki that was good? I'm only half joking - we've been through a few of them, and never found anything that was easy enough to use that people actually would. And thus everything gets shoved into email, and perpetually lost.
I'm actually kind of excited about the idea of an internal StackOverflow. Of course, people would have to actually use it, and that battlefield is littered with the shattered corpses of a million productivity and communication and social tools.
Atlassian's "Questions for Confluence" is only half the price. https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/questions
I've used Questions for Confluence before. I've noticed that from the "supply side" (someone writing documentation), it's not better than writing a Confluence article. From the "demand side" (someone having a question), it doesn't beat the immediacy of Slack. So while I'm glad to have the option to have team SO, I'm not sure it solves the documentation problem better than other tools.
Because Discourse is a message board, not a Q&A site? Not bashing Discourse at all. In fact I wish I saw it in the wild more often.
A forum is nearly there. With open source, all you need is a third party plugin to turn it into what you want: https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-solved-accepted-answe...
That plugin hardly turns Discourse into a full fledged Q&A site. It merely adds a button to mark a specific post as "The Answer". While that may be sufficient for many, there is a reason that StackOverflow has tags, tailored search, reputation, closing, etc. That's what they are selling with that $5 price tag.
Its creator would disagree with you. [1] [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/12/28/stack-overflow-is-...
That's Joel's version of link bait headline. It works nothing like a wiki. But of course, you already know that if you've used Stack Overflow. But, tomato, tomato.
Its creator would disagree with you. [1] [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/12/28/stack-overflow-is-...
That's Joel's version of link bait headline. It works nothing like a wiki. But of course, you already know that if you've used Stack Overflow. But, tomato, tomato.
wi·ki noun
a website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users.
StackOverflow is a website that allows users to edit the content of questions, answers, and tags. It also allows users to write new questions, new answers, and close existing questions and answers. How is that "nothing like a wiki"?
Seems like "yet another tool to try to offset the problem of requirements, code, and architectural decisions not being adequately documented for future staff to understand." Sometimes I wonder if software teams should add technical writers embed with developers, architects, QA, and BA assets to actually document All The Things and keep documentation up to date. Yes, that will mean re-writing documentations as people change their minds in response to business needs but it would provide an historical record that answers "How the hell did our systems end up looking like this?" which seems to plague every organization that hires programmers to write custom code. Sometimes it's hard to give the developers who wrote the code the benefit of the doubt that they made the wisest decision based on all known variables at the time. I'm certainly guilty of questioning the intelligence, breeding, motivations, etc of the programmer of an app I had to modify once... only to realize that I had written the code in question four years previously. Eventually I remembered why the feature had to be coded that way and wrote a 1200 word comment section explaining why the feature was written the way it was and how one should orient their state of mind to understand and edit the logic. And I further apologized for the clusterfuck of code that the feature was and left my personal email address in case a future programmer wanted to berate me for it. And three years later I did get an email from someone saying they had been laughing for ten minutes because they had gone from "WTF?" to gradual understanding as they read through my verbose description of why... ending with laughter that I was willing to take whatever vitriol they had left over via email so they could vent and get back to work. Whether that dev updated the comments to reflect their changes is something to which I have no answer.
This is an interesting play but doesn't seem like a good fit. The examples on the front page: "how do I connect to our database", "what kind of email templates do we have". Are these questions that you're going to get multiple answers for and I'm going to upvote the best and/or select one as the "selected" answer. I would think this would be a sign of dysfunction in most cases. And how does the gamification play into…
I think searching and linking to existing questions (internally and externally) would be useful.
The useful parts you name sound a lot like a wiki.
Stack Overflow largely relies on Google Search, but for private teams it won't be available. And internal search is just unreliable.
Also I fail to see how answers on SO for Teams are supposed to be less "stale" than your old wiki articles.
For me, at least our corporate wiki is more organized, without duplicates, whereas Stack Overflow's modus operandi is largely relies on creating thousands of duplicated questions.