OSQA - Free, Open Source Question & Answers System • Hacker News Board

OSQA - Free, Open Source Question & Answers System

#1

Post by yadirosadi » Tue, Jan 18, 2011, 2:46 AM UTC

OSQA is the free, open source Q&A system, OSQA site is more than just an FAQ page, it is a full-featured Q&A community. Users earn points which are called “karma points” and badges for useful participation, and everyone in the community wins.

OSQA - Free, Open Source Question & Answers System
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Re: OSQA - Free, Open Source Question & Answers System

#2

Post by bravura » Tue, Jan 18, 2011, 4:24 AM UTC

OSQA is the technology behind MetaOptimize Q+A (http://metaoptimize.com/qa), a niche q+a site for machine learning and natural language processing.

Re: OSQA - Free, Open Source Question & Answers System

#3

Post by rufugee » Tue, Jan 18, 2011, 4:27 AM UTC

Liked it...used it...modified it. Wasn't bad. The code was a bit convoluted in places and almost completely undocumented, and they strayed from the typical Django style. All added up, it was negative productivity for this long-term Rails programmer and Django novice. Switched to Shapado (based on Rails) and things are going much better, if for nothing more than Rails' self-documenting conventions. The only drawback is that Shapado is based on mongodb and the (compared to active record) functionally incomplete mongomapper.

Re: OSQA - Free, Open Source Question & Answers System

#4

Post by dangrossman » Tue, Jan 18, 2011, 4:40 AM UTC

I wonder why they don't attempt to differentiate from what they're cloning at all. OSQA's replicated not just functionality but look and feel, ordering and layout of each StackExchange (StackOverflow, ServerFault, et al) feature.

Re: OSQA - Free, Open Source Question & Answers System

#5

Post by matthiaswh » Tue, Jan 18, 2011, 6:04 AM UTC

dangrossman wrote: post #4

I wonder why they don't attempt to differentiate from what they're cloning at all. OSQA's replicated not just functionality but look and feel, ordering and layout of each StackExchange (StackOverflow, ServerFault, et al) feature.

They addressed this in a recent blog post: http://www.osqa.net/2010/04/20/dont-panic-stackexchange-is-n...

The impression I get is they want to create a platform that matches the SE system, and then advance it above and beyond what SE is.

Re: OSQA - Free, Open Source Question & Answers System

#6

Post by daviding » Tue, Jan 18, 2011, 6:12 AM UTC

A rails / mongodb project also exists for this called http://shapado.com/

Code here: https://github.com/patcito/shapado

Personally I am still uncomfortable with rolling out a site that looks exactly like StackOverflow. I imagine it could be a good basis to start on though.