The ask.elmershack.com Q&A site started December 2009 on the stackexchange platform. This excellent platform is a fork of the same engine that runs the popular programming question and answer site stackoverflow. The beta offering for stack exchange gave anybody the chance to start a website on the platform for just about any topic using the powerful stackoverflow engine. So - I started the elmershack Q&A site to see how far it would go.
When I first started the site I had the following goals:
- Have Fun doing something I'd never done before - run a public website.
- Provide a better experience to the ham community for asking and answering questions.
This April - there was an announcement made that the stackexchange model would be changing. You can read about the changes here: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/04/changes-to-stack-exchange/. To summarize them - they wouldn't be offering the original hosting model anymore and instead would be switching to a community driven model where only sites that had enough interest (read participation) would be developed and allowed to continue. To people running sites on stack exchange, we were given a deadline of July 13, 2010 after which the sites may or may not be kept alive. So the existing ask.elmershack.com site is living on borrowed time. The deadline has passed and the site could be shutdown any time now.
Luckily, there are several open source stackexchange clones. I've chosen to move ask.elmershack.com to the OSQA stack and will be launching it soon. You can view a test site that I've setup at test.elmershack.com.
There are several advantages to migrating to OSQA. I'll have much more control of the environment and better ability to keep the site going on much cheaper hosting solutions than would have been the case given the original offering on stackexchange. Also the OSQA platform is being very actively developed and should keep improving over time.
There are also disadvantages. I anticipate some problems with logging in due to the way that open id works and especially given the way that google and yahoo implemented the open id standard. They will give different keys to different domains for the same user. However, since I will have direct access to the database I will hopefully be able to handle these problems and merge any duplicate accounts that get created as people log into the system for the first time. However, the OSQA system allows for standard password logins which is a nice improvement. Please send email to team@elmershack.com if you have problems logging in to the new site, and I will do my best to resolve them.
I hope that you enjoy the new site and continue to post good questions and give excellent answers.
Thanks!
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