

Area 51: We Come in Peace (propose the next Stack Overflow) - mwsherman
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/area-51-we-come-in-peace/

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kylec
I've proposed an Apple site on Area 51, since iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, etc.
questions aren't allowed on Super User, a sister site of Stack Overflow for
general computer-related questions. Of course, the site will cover Macs as
well.

The proposal process is still in beta, but already the Apple site has gained a
bit of traction and is within the top 10% of the sites proposed. While the
proposal has enough followers, it still needs at least 5 of both on- and off-
topic questions to move to the commitment phase. Questions are considered on-
or off-topic if they have at least 20 on- or off-topic votes respectively.

If you are a user of Stack Overflow, or if you just want a place where you can
quickly get great answers to your Apple questions, please go to the proposal
page and click the "Follow" link, and vote on the sample questions. Thanks.

[http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/151/apple?referrer...](http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/151/apple?referrer=HIAuOPuopM81)

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michael_dorfman
Wow, illustrations by Terry Colon! God, I miss _suck.com_ \-- one of the
brightest spots of the early web days...

~~~
trunnell
Ha! Remember _Filler?_ <http://www.suck.com/filler/archive/>

Heather Havrilesky is still writing, now at Salon as well as
<http://rabbitblog.com/>

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dgritsko
The idea of building communities of experts on a particular topic is great,
however most of the proposed sites look like they could _almost_ belong on one
of the existing sites (e.g., Web Applications, Gaming, Electronic Gadgets --
all very tech-oriented). This makes perfect sense, since the most of Area 51's
users (at the moment) came from SO/SF/SU. I'm a big fan of SO and would love
to see this new venture be successful, I'm just interested to see if/how it
will be advertised to those who are not users of the Stack Overflow family of
sites.

~~~
alanstorm
I assume they'll just let it go viral. The communities that grow out of the
existing user base will have some overlap with slightly less technical people.
This, in turn leads to slightly less technical people being exposed to the
platform as users and eventually starting communities that feature people
slightly less technical than them.

Repeat until cat pictures show up.

~~~
jrockway
O HAI.

Just thought I'd mention that technical people like lolcats too.

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Tycho
I was thinking the other day, a lot of people would probably use a music-
oriented SO-clone. You'd have the casual crowd of 'what are the chords to...,'
music theory questions, but most significantly i think you'd get lots of music
software/hardware questions. Call it REverb.com or something.

I think all the commenting, tagging, voting, and reputation features of SO are
strong enough to appeal to non-geeks too.

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benofsky
Seems overly complicated, I have no idea what's going on when I visit Area 51,
I guess this is their strategy for turning away uncommitted users.

Also, how are they going to make money?

~~~
spolsky
Indeed, we are using Area 51 to gauge commitment to a particular Q&A site so
it does have a certain amount of hoops to jump through. The last time we tried
to let people create Stack Exchange sites without demonstrated commitment,
most sites did not have enough users to be viable. Area 51 is, so far, doing a
great job of identifying the topics for which there is a devoted audience. We
also assume that people who are highly committed to Stack Overflow are far
more likely to participate in a new Stack Exchange alms therefore we've really
built this system for them, the highly engaged, high reputation Stack Overflow
user.

~~~
sev
What is "highly committed"? - is it scaled by reputation, or is "highly
committed" defined at a particular reputation level, question count, or number
of answers?

~~~
spolsky
Check out the area51 tag on <http://meta.stackoverflow.com> for endless in
depth discussion of the exact mechanics.

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SingAlong
Just created a space for Android.

<http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/7418/android>

I just can't stop my android development craze and needless to say the
official Android support community is on SO and just depends on questions
tagged "Android" :(

~~~
Wolf_Larsen
Hey, awesome proposal. I just voted on the sample questions. They were all
good examples IMO.

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wcarss
I am a pissed off new user to Area 51.

I had an idea for a stackexchange site a while ago - but did not take the time
to go and make it. Upon seeing this, I thought "hooray, now I can see if it
holds any merit!"

So I went to the site. First thing's first: I want to search to see if my idea
has been done. There's the search box! My idea is essentially teach people how
to learn things (as in, what order to learn what topics and how to learn those
subtopics best) in a wiki-tized fashion. So I type 'how to' in the search box
and hit enter.

Nothing happens.

So I click the magnifying glass to the left of the box...

Nothing happens.

Unfazed, I decide it must be because I'm not logged in. I trundle to the
create account page, login with my OpenID, and see I'm 'User3840'. Best be
changing that!

I click on my name and get taken to a profile page where I can click edit. I
do so, and fill out the form with my real life information, because I like
being a human to the people I meet on the internet. I change my name to
'wcarss', and:

Oops! There was a problem updating your profile: * unusual error updating your
profile -- please try again!

So I do. Same error. Okay... So I decide to remain anonymous and just search
for my idea again. As a good user, I should make sure there's no duplicates!

Still doesn't work at all.

Okay, so it's buggy. I'm a bit unhappy now but I know what to do: submit a bug
report. At the bottom of the page is a friendly link, 'feedback always
welcome', so I click it and travel to meta.stackoverflow.com

I make a new account here after registering my OpenID. It seems strange that I
now have two separate accounts (User148067 on meta and User3840 on area51)
despite having one OpenID associated with both and both running from the same
group of people, but hey it's okay.

I go to post feedback, and leave my browser version, os, repro steps, helpful
tags, and the urls I had failed search on. Hit 'Post Your Question' - uh oh!

Oops! Your question couldn't be submitted because: * we're sorry, but as a
spam prevention mechanism, new users can only post a maximum of one hyperlink.
Earn 10 reputation to post more hyperlinks. * users with less than 99
reputation can't create new tags. The tags 'fail issue' are new. Try using
existing tags instead.

I'm now infuriated; so I came here to post what's happened so far. I'm going
to remove all of my tags because I have /no idea/ what tags already exist, and
I'm going to make my url's not clickable. I am forced into being less helpful.

Finally, I've posted something! Now if anyone sees it and responds, I'll know
why the site is broken for me. I can't change my name on meta either. As a
user that just wanted to participate and to be a good community member, I've
been left soured to the entire StackOverflow experience.

~~~
df07
Within 4 minutes you received the correct reply:

[http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/54264/search-
doesnt-...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/54264/search-doesnt-seem-
to-work-on-area51/54265#54265)

"how" and "to" are stop words, so they're stripped from your search.

In the tag box on the create new question form it tells you to use the tag
"bug":

<http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/ask>

I have no idea why editing your profile failed, but it works fine for me.

Your accounts were not automatically associated because Area 51 is new and
does not auto-associate with the other sites yet.

~~~
wcarss
Actually, that was not the correct reply - but it was a swift reply!

I ended up using 'bug' and 'search' as tags. I've cooled down considerably now
- but as a user, that was a terrible set of experiences that left me very
frustrated. Even as a computer scientist, it left me asking myself why their
product has been released with (what appear to me to be) major flaws.

Edit: after manually associating my account on meta with area51, and trying
for a second time on meta to change my profile name, it was successful.

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patrickmclaren
AI, anyone? [http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6607/artificial-
in...](http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6607/artificial-intelligence)
:-)

