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

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


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

Why is askdev format better than forum?

• the site has the ability to vote for questions / answers, which allows you to sort data by rating and date of receipt.
  
• 
  the person who asked the question can choose the best, in his opinion, answer. The best answer is highlighted in color, and is always attached above the rest of the answers. But on the forum, useful information is often buried deep in the discussion thread, 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.
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  On askdev, people either answer the question or comment, so the answers are separate from the comments that are hidden by default.
  
  
• The forum is a ready-made “engine” and its functionality is expanded through modules that you often have to write yourself. When updating the engine version, you need to update the modules, which leads to delays. Thus, time is spent not on developing new features, but on troubleshooting.
  
  
• Another problem of the forums is moderation. Very often, the correctness of a section moderator is very controversial, and as a result, aversion is generated either towards him or towards the resource as a whole. Of course, it will not be possible to do completely without moderation, but with the help of ratings you can achieve a good level of community self-regulation. Currently, a rating system works on askdev, but so far no restrictions are imposed 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 rather 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.
  
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  There is an internal mail in which you can communicate with several participants at once. Internal mail on stackoverflow is also missing
  
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  You can add other users as a friend. What for? A true friend will not throw in trouble :) When you ask a question, your friends will be notified by email about such an event.
  
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  On the site, you can create groups to unite people 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 is allowed when formatting
  

In the right place at the right time.

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

Monetization.

Now everyone is focused on developing fully or partially paid services and it seems that advertising has disappeared. It becomes clear that the advertising model is already a small one. But with this state of affairs, I do not quite agree. Of course, it’s difficult to monetize a social network with disparate user interests in advertising; but if you advertise on a niche service, then its efficiency will be higher, and the attractiveness of such an advertisement for a potential advertiser will become more obvious.

What is planned in the near future:

• bugfixes 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
• a few 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 equal environment (for example, beginners with beginners, gurus with other gurus)
  

A few words about the technical implementation.

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

Summary

• a large set of sorting answers by rating, date created, number of answers, and so on.
  
• RSS support
  
• user ratings, questions and answers
  
• loading images at the moment of editing
  
• HTML is allowed
  
• source code highlighting (used GeShi)
  
• answer! = comment
  
• internal mail, including group messages
  
• friends, and alerts about their questions
  
• groups
  
• registration to choose from: OpenID or "standard"
  

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

The next post about what habraeffekt meant for us .