www.askdev.ru - Russian analogue of stackoverflow.com

I want to introduce a project that, on the one hand, is the Russian counterpart to stackoverflow.com and an alternative to forums, on the other. But why an analog, not a clone? And how is it different from forums?
These and other questions have been asked me more than once - I will try to answer them.


The aim of the project is to create a convenient place for comfortable communication and exchange of experience of IT professionals, as well as for searching and storing information already received.

Why is askdev format better than a forum?

• the site has the ability to vote for questions / answers, which allows you to sort by rating and date of receipt.
  
• 
  the person who asked the question can choose the best answer, in his opinion. The best answer is highlighted, and is always attached above the rest of the answers. But on the forum, useful information is often buried deep in the thread of discussion, and the user is forced to read the whole topic, in the hope that there is a correct answer. That is, the forum is a discussion.
  
  On askdev, people either answer the question or comment, so the answers are separated from the comments, which are hidden by default
  
  
• the forum is a ready-made “engine” and its functionality is expanded through modules that often have to be written yourself. When updating the version of the engine, you need to update the modules, which leads to delays. Thus, time is wasted not on developing new features, but on troubleshooting.
  
  
• Another problem with forums is moderation. Very often, the correctness of the section moderator is very controversial, and as a result, hostility is generated either towards him or to the resource as a whole. Of course, you won’t be able to manage completely without moderation, but with the help of ratings you can achieve a good level of community self-regulation. Askdev currently has a rating system, but so far no restrictions have been placed on users with a negative rating.
  
  
• Each question is tagged. If you are interested in a narrow topic, you can filter questions by several tags and subscribe to RSS.
  
  

How are we different from stackoverflow.com?

• 
  there is a direct loading of images when editing or creating a question / answer (in ajax style). It is clear that the need to attach images appears quite rarely, but it is in such rare cases that the lack of this functionality is annoying: you need to upload a picture to a third-party hosting, etc. For example, on stackoverflow there is no such possibility at all.
  
• 
  There is an internal mail in which you can chat with several participants at once. Internal mail on stackoverflow is also missing
  
• 
  You can add other users as friends. What for? A true friend will not leave you in trouble :) When you ask a question, your friends will be notified by email about such an event
  
• 
  You can create groups on the site to bring people together for narrower interests. The guys from stackoverflow solved this problem easier by running serverfault.com and superuser.com (not yet running)
  
• 
  registration works both on OpenID, and standard - on login and password.
  
• 
  HTML enabled when formatting
  

In the right place at the right time.

Looking through existing projects, I concluded that there is room for a new resource in RuNet. On the one hand, there are several popular forums for programmers, on the other hand, question-answer services from larger projects. All these services are convenient for communication on various topics, but their very broad focus, in my opinion, is only a minus in this context. Such a minimum as highlighting the source codes there is not to be expected. This is precisely the bottleneck between forums and question-answer services that we are trying to fill with our project.

Monetization.

Now everything is aimed at developing fully or partially paid services and it seems that advertising has disappeared. It becomes clear that the advertising model is already small enough for anyone. But with this state of things, I do not quite agree. Of course, monetizing a social network advertising with disparate user interests is difficult; but if you advertise on a niche service, then its effectiveness will be higher, and the attractiveness of such advertising for a potential advertiser will become more apparent.

What is planned to be done in the near future:

• bug fixes and new features based on feedback
• friends
• closed groups (for posting questions only to the group, excluding getting into the main thread)
• improved design and usability
• several more ideas are at the planning stage, aimed at solving such problems - I want to get an answer, and I want to communicate with my environment (for example, beginners with beginners, gurus with other gurus)
  

A few words about technical implementation.

The project is built on the Zend Framework (currently version 1.8), MySQL, the client part is prototype.

Summary

• A large set of sorting answers by rating, creation date, number of answers, etc.
  
• RSS support
  
• user ratings, questions and answers
  
• loading images at the time of editing
  
• HTML allowed
  
• source code highlighting (used by GeShi)
  
• answer! = comment
  
• internal mail, including group messages
  
• friends, and alerts about their issues
  
• groups
  
• registration of choice: OpenID or "standard"
  

I would be very grateful for any feedback and questions. If you like the project follow us via twitter .

The next post is about what the habraeffect meant to us .