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Hey HN, checkout my little Free/Opensource StackOverFlow site
5 points by papachito on Sept 22, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments
Shapado.com (http://shapado.com) is our (me and a couple of friends) attempt at providing a free as in freedom replacement for stackoverflow (SOF) with some improvements. It's coded in rails and uses mongodb.

What we have right now that SOF lacks somehow is:

* Multi-topic: We think it’s overkill to create a new site for every subject like SOF does with serverfault and others so shapado is not limited to programming, we have a set of pre-defined categories such as technology, science, politics and more.

To visit the programming category, just point your browser to http://programming.shapado.com/ As each question can be tagged, you can even combined tags and categories that way: http://programming.visualbasic.shapado.com/ ;) Possibilities are endless. You can also combine tags, categories and languages such as http://programming.es.jquery.shapado.com or http://es.kde.shapado.com/ to get all questions about KDE in Spanish.

* Multi-language: the site is available in English, Spanish and French already. We expect more to come with the help from the community.

* Reputation: Like SOF, we have a reputation system. For now everybody is free to do everything, actually, unlike SOF you will even get points for simply posting questions or answering but this will be disabled once we get a substantial userbase… so go and ask your questions now to get loads of reputations points! We will also require a certain amount of reputation points to do certain actions in the future.

* We will provide data dumps of all our questions and answers plus an API, so that there is total data portability. Note that all the data on the site is under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license so technically you can already scrap your data and take it with you ;)

* You can freely install it on your own server. Make sure to grab the source here (http://gitorious.org/shapado) or get the torrent here (http://foss.hexagon.cc/torrents/48220-Shapado_1_0), it has most of the necessary dependencies to run shapado on all platforms.

See the full announcement here: http://blog.ricodigo.com/2009/09/22/shapado-a-foss-replacement-for-stackoverflow



Clickable:

http://shapado.com

http://blog.ricodigo.com/2009/09/22/shapado-a-foss-replaceme...


Would it be possible to add an alternative to OpenID login ? I don't like OpenID logins, don't want to use it, and boycott (as in don't register) to websites where it is the only solution.

Am I the only one in this situation ?


you can use this form to sign up: http://shapado.com/signup http://shapado.com/login


what ever happened to historical NNTP search? Usenet used to be the tool for getting advice on this sort of thing.

But yeah, key is not your interface; key is who you can attract, and the web forms tend to attract a younger (read: less experienced) crowd.


ooh, do you have a good interface to email? that would be valuable. Hell, I'm still a year or so away from 30, not really a greybeard, but I greatly prefer mailing lists to web forms. (he says on a web form.)


You can get notifications by mail but you can't reply by mail yet, it's a good idea though and we may add it in the future. Also, if you know rails you could actually help us add it :)


Yeah. thing is, I've not seen a good integration between forms and email. I bet the hard part isn't implementing; it's figuring out what a good implementation is. Ultimately, you'd want the email interface to look like an email list, and the web form to look like a web form, but you'd want the content on both, and I'm not sure what the best way to do that is.




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