Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange is currently in Private Beta

http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com just opened for private beta, so should be public beta in a couple weeks.

http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com just opened for private beta, so should be public beta in a couple weeks.

I saw a post about this the other day. What is it please?

Stackexchange is basically a Q&A site for geeks. It's generally set up so that users can ask - and answer - questions on a fairly tightly defined area; specific questions that can actually be answered more or less definitively are the norm. Often a great place to find a solution to a specific problem.

I imagine the R-Pi sub-site will be based on questions around the Pi

[liz]

So…a bit like these forums, then, but without any input from the Raspberry Pi developers?

A community of enthusiasts asking and answering questions about Raspberry Pi hardware and software based on the same platform which powers Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow has proven to be an excellent resource for high quality answers to programming questions for four years.

So…a bit like these forums, then, but without any input from the Raspberry Pi developers?

Participation is open.

I love Stack Overflow because it is easy to get peer support from experienced people for sometimes very difficult problems where Google doesn't really help.

Because they don't operate like forums, and the Q&A structure is relatively tightly moderated, the signal to noise ratio is high and the ability to get answers quickly is also high. Also, the threading is not as difficult to follow as on forums.

Stack Exchange sites also figure highly in Google search results, which makes it a frequent destination for beginning programmers, possibly meaning that a large number of Pi users will be getting their programming questions answered on Stack Overflow.

So…a bit like these forums, then, but without any input from the Raspberry Pi developers?

Well, a bit, yes. But forums aren't a great place for highly specific, technical questions; they tend to get quickly buried under a bunch of other more general topics and repeats of the same entry-level problems. Which is not to say those types of things aren't also important, but it often helps to spin the tricky stuff off into a defined space.

I've used stackoverflow for a while for other things, and the signal-to-noise ratio is very high; I've never needed to actually ask a question there as the answer has usually already been posted to a similar or identical one. Plus the site design/setup is very specifically designed for that sort of thing, and to be slightly blunt, is usually pretty heavily moderated to keep things tight and on topic, which wouldn't be appropriate in a more general discussion/q&a setup like these forums.

[liz]

Lord, I wish you could see some of the stuff we moderate here! (Although we moderate it so you don't have to see it…so I suppose that's a little self-defeating.)

I'm a firm believer that good moderation is the way to keep a community's personality sane and pleasant. If Stack Exchange do that, so much the better.

So…a bit like these forums, then, but without any input from the Raspberry Pi developers?

Hopefully they will come over to SE too! (Please, please!)

In my experience, Stack Exchange is a MUCH more pleasant experience for Q&A. Forums are great for discussion. Stack Exchange is great for Q&A. Community moderation, reputation building, voting, the concept of accepted answers - it all leads to a fantastic experience. The best parts though are A) When you land on SE because you were looking for an answer in Google, it is very easy to find the answer, you don't have to dig through the potentially long context of a forum topic. B) All of the content on SE is public domain. They don't try to claim rights to any of the user submitted content.

My only peeve with the Raspberry Pi SE site right now is that it is named "Raspberry Pi". No offense I just think it would be better if it were like the e-linux wiki and covered all devices like the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, PandaBoard, etc, since there is so much overlap.

Can't wait to see this site take off!

My only peeve with the Raspberry Pi SE site right now is that it is named "Raspberry Pi". No offense I just think it would be better if it were like the e-linux wiki and covered all devices like the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, PandaBoard, etc, since there is so much overlap.

I guess you could say the same thing about http://unix.stackexchange.com/

Now in public beta: http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/