

OSQA - Free, Open Source Question & Answers System - yadirosadi
http://blogupstairs.com/open-source/osqa-free-open-source-questions-answer-system/
OSQA is the free, open source Q&#38;A system, OSQA site is more than just an FAQ page, it is a full-featured Q&#38;A community. Users earn points which are called “karma points” and badges for useful participation, and everyone in the community wins.
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daviding
A rails / mongodb project also exists for this called <http://shapado.com/>

Code here: <https://github.com/patcito/shapado>

Personally I am still uncomfortable with rolling out a site that looks exactly
like StackOverflow. I imagine it could be a good basis to start on though.

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derwiki
Maybe not rolling out for public use, but I've found OSQA perfect for internal
knowledge bases. Doubles as a quick way to vote for one off things ("I'm doing
a talk on HTML5, add and vote-up what you guys want me to talk about").

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rufugee
Liked it...used it...modified it. Wasn't bad. The code was a bit convoluted in
places and almost completely undocumented, and they strayed from the typical
Django style. All added up, it was negative productivity for this long-term
Rails programmer and Django novice. Switched to Shapado (based on Rails) and
things are going much better, if for nothing more than Rails' self-documenting
conventions. The only drawback is that Shapado is based on mongodb and the
(compared to active record) functionally incomplete mongomapper.

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dangrossman
I wonder why they don't attempt to differentiate from what they're cloning at
all. OSQA's replicated not just functionality but look and feel, ordering and
layout of each StackExchange (StackOverflow, ServerFault, et al) feature.

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matthiaswh
They addressed this in a recent blog post:
[http://www.osqa.net/2010/04/20/dont-panic-stackexchange-
is-n...](http://www.osqa.net/2010/04/20/dont-panic-stackexchange-is-not-the-
goal/)

The impression I get is they want to create a platform that matches the SE
system, and then advance it above and beyond what SE is.

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bravura
OSQA is the technology behind MetaOptimize Q+A (<http://metaoptimize.com/qa>),
a niche q+a site for machine learning and natural language processing.

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sghael
I'm a user/dabbler of OSQA, and the project is very nice. However, IMO there
are several things holding the project back from greater community
involvement:

1) the lack of an official GIT backed repo. 2) the current state of tickets
(who's working on what, and how) is very messy. Its managed through Jira, and
its just hard to see where things stand.

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cosmohh
Besides the fact that it does look like stackexchange, you have to keep in
mind that the criteria to start a new stackexchange are quite high in terms of
users/questions/traffic. So OSQA can be a good alternative to keep
stackexchanges (such as <http://semanticoverflow.com> which lacks enough users
to be restarted as part of stackexchange.com) alive which where created at a
time as they were still offering private/seperate installations, due to its
import ability.

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flipside
This or Shapado would certainly making prototyping some new Q&A features
easier.

If I don't know ruby or python yet, which one would be easier to tinker with?

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lzy
Direct link to the main site itself;

<http://www.osqa.net/>

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jdp23
Potentially useful. How well do this and Shapado scale?

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Zakuzaa
Any good PHP/MYSQL QA systems?

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lzy
<http://www.question2answer.org/>

