On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Marcus Liebhardt <marcus.liebhardt@yujinrobot.com> wrote:
Sorry guys, seems like I didn't make myself clear enough.
My intention is _NOT_ merging ROS Answers into another existing Q&A site, such as StackOverflow (
http://stackoverflow.com/) or Robotics (mentioned in the other thread).
I suggest moving our Q&A to StackExchange (
http://stackexchange.com/), which is an aggregation of various Q&A sites all sharing the same underlying system (software as far as I understand).
So, we would still have our own, ROS-only Q&A site.
First, sorry for the misunderstanding.
Second, I think part of why answers.ros.org was created was that it takes a while to get a new stackexchange site approved (as you can see from the area51 stuff). Back when ROS answers was launched, it would have taken too long to get such a site set up on stackexchange.
At this point maybe the community is big enough to merit a stackexchange site, but I imagine there would be no way to copy all of the past answers from
answers.ros.org to a new site, and so we'd lose a large amount of accumulated knowledge.
I don't know how challenging it is to maintain
answers.ros.org, but at least from the user-end it's fairly simple to create an account via OpenID.
So I'm not sure how much we'd actually gain from switching to another platform, but we'd definitely fragment a lot of already-accumulated information.