How should we get the word out about the OSQA project?

I spent the past two hours investigating StackOverflow and StackExchange clones. I almost didn't find OSQA, as I describe a bit in this thread.

You should keep in mind that it is very difficult for people to know to use OSQA, or that this option even exists. This person investigated a handful of stackoverflow clones, evaluated the health of the project and how actively maintained it was, found example sites, and didn't even figure out that OSQA is a more healthy fork of CNprog, nor did he realize that it even existed: link. And this guy was trying to be very comprehensive!

I dug a little deeper and posted a comment, but you should know that people (myself included) generally don't look at github forks if the main branch has had commits in the past month (which CNprog has).

If people like the fellow in the link above don't know about OSQA, how can we expect other people to find out about it?

asked 07 Feb '10, 17:30

Joseph's gravatar image

Joseph
1.5k326670
accept rate: 36%

edited 07 Mar '10, 12:46

rickross's gravatar image

rickross ♦♦
12.0k2514168


I, too, barely found OSQA. It was mentioned in some podcast I was listening to.

  1. To start - I think the OSQA is a very confusing name. I still can't remember it! Why not just OpenQA or something like that?
  2. Hosting the source code on obscure internal revision control system does you no good. Use GitHub or Google Code. This will make it both more "findable" by google, internets and developers - and easier to contribute it.
  3. Drop svn (well - maybe that won't make you more popular right away - but will surely get people more likely to contribute).
  4. Start a Blog and submit it to Django Feed. It really gets a lot of traffic if the posts are good.
  5. Try to reach out to meta.stackoverflow crowd somehow? There are a lot of people wanting to make their own SO - but they never even heard of osqa!
  6. Come up with a better name (oh wait - did I say that already?)
link

answered 02 May '10, 00:47

drozzy's gravatar image

drozzy
19638
accept rate: 0%

edited 02 May '10, 00:52

2

I wrote an email to Patrick Lightbody (who currently owns the domains OpenQA.net and OpenQA.org) to see if he'd consider letting us use them. He and I have both been active in the Java world for many years, so maybe he'll be open to the idea.

(02 May '10, 10:00) rickross ♦♦
1

I agree that git allows more people to more easily contribute. The difficulty is that the core developers prefer SVN, so they migrated from git to SVN.

(04 May '10, 21:05) Joseph

OSQA seems to have a nice homepage. I think you guys should compile these items ASAP in order to effectively promote OSQA

  • Demo page (with Administration login as well)

  • More user-friendly download page (right now I just can download OSQA via GitHub and I don't even know which version it is)

  • More user-friendly installation guide

  • A page to explain for those-who-has-never-been-to-StackOverflow the concept of this (what's the differences between this and forum, why should we use this, it's good for what, what are the badges, what are the rules )

link

answered 17 Apr '10, 02:24

Sim's gravatar image

Sim
45151015
accept rate: 12%

These are really good suggestions, Sim. Thanks! We've just begun to use our wiki to start creating documentation and other support resources. Would you be interested in helping write some of this?

(17 Apr '10, 09:06) rickross ♦♦

One month after your post: I agree with you and I really think that in this case the git model may be poisoning the project. I think that in this stage all we want is to have one main branch where several people can commit their changes, one release branch and some experimental branches - all o these could work SVN. I think that git complexity could stop others from adopting the platform - I had a similar experience with mercurial and I got back to subversion.

link

answered 07 Mar '10, 12:08

sorin's gravatar image

sorin
1.0k194346
accept rate: 11%

I agree with sorin that the git model is rather more a barrier than a booster. Although git has some advantages, it tends to encourage forking and isolation rather than team effort. I would be delighted to lose git.

(07 Mar '10, 12:34) rickross ♦♦
3

What the heck are you people talking about? Git is leaps and bounds easier to work with. You can create identical setup to the svn system. Advantage is that if you use something like GitHub you allow forking and contributing without worrying about generating patches and such.

(02 May '10, 00:50) drozzy

I agree with you that it should NOT be a fork of some other project on github. But I Do think that it warrants it's own GitHub project entry. This is to enable other contributers forking of OSQA.

I don't really care for CNprog.

(02 May '10, 01:14) drozzy

I LOVE mercurial HG but I agree with your statement. New tech could be off putting for some programmers.

(02 May '10, 09:44) Russell Ball...
2

Do I understand correctly: you went from git to svn?!? oO Well, that won't prevent me from git svn cloneing the source... In fact, I believe it should be the official way to check-out the source. ;-)

(02 May '10, 10:44) Olivier

I found osQA on a meta.stackoverflow.com question about StackExchange's plan to close its source. I would have never known about it had I not read that question...

I think osQA is a great name, but I think we should write out it's name when promoting:

Open Source Question and Answer (osQA) web application.

link

answered 02 May '10, 09:41

Russell%20Ballestrini's gravatar image

Russell Ball...
42751113
accept rate: 25%

Your answer
toggle preview

Follow this question

By Email:

Once you sign in you will be able to subscribe for any updates here

By RSS:

Answers

Answers and Comments

Markdown Basics

  • *italic* or _italic_
  • **bold** or __bold__
  • link:[text](http://url.com/ "title")
  • image?![alt text](/path/img.jpg "title")
  • numbered list: 1. Foo 2. Bar
  • to add a line break simply add two spaces to where you would like the new line to be.
  • basic HTML tags are also supported

Tags:

×277
×6
×4

Asked: 07 Feb '10, 17:30

Seen: 1,279 times

Last updated: 02 May '10, 09:41

powered by OSQA