

Stack Overflow's new "Web Apps" site is in public beta - mwsherman
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/

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garyrichardson
I've browsed around a bit. This site actually seems quite useful. If nothing
else, it's a good sounding board for "What is the best web site for X"

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evilduck
Unless they change the "rules", I think it will suffer the same problem as the
other Stacks: They don't handle duplicate questions very well.

In succession, duplicates are annoying and detrimental, but on the other hand,
the best answer in 2008 may not be the best answer in 2010 and there's no easy
way to update old questions and bring attention to their need for new answers.

The set of answers for broad questions at SO is gradually becoming stale and
the new questions are beginning to become uselessly specific to the person who
asks the question.

Maybe a way to append or revise older questions as a lower-reputation user
would help, and doing so would bring the question back into the community's
foreground to be seen by fresh eyes.

Edit: "They" meaning the website, the community and the SO engine combined,
not necessarily one or the other individually.

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digitallogic
This site seems like it would suffer even more so. On Joel's blog, the the
announcement for this site [1] asked "Want to know how ... delete your
Facebook account?". How long is the accepted answer to that question going to
be up to date, and will it be updated every time Facebook tweaks their site to
discourage account deletion?

1: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/07/07.html>

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mhp
'will it be updated every time Facebook tweaks their site to discourage
account deletion?' - that's the idea.

'How long is the accepted answer to that question going to be up to date?' -
hopefully as soon as FB changes the system and someone realizes the answer is
wrong.

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blasdel
But their software is heavily reified against that sort of thing -- a new
answer is made and then it's karma would have to surpass the existing one
(which the karma-inflation problem makes easier) but it also needs to get
accepted in place of the existing one, screwing over the original answerer.
The already-accepted answer could also be community-wiki-edited beyond
recognition.

Pretending temporality doesn't exist doesn't make it go away.

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zyb09
To whomever put this custom skin over the SO Engine (and sure you're reading
HN, aren't you?), that's an awesome job. This site looks really unique
compared to Stackoverflow, Superuser etc. and quiet appealing too.

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Raphael
Are you kidding? The grid lines don't line up with anything.

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aaronblohowiak
Chrome, OSX. The grid lines match the story separator lines and the baseline
of all of the fonts. the "Top Questions" and the navigation tabs are off, but
the rest is on. the drop shadow of the top bar is about 3px off from the top
bar itself...

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ashconnor
I'm not sure I get fragmenting into every little niche and creating a new site
for it.

Stackoverflow, ServerFault, SuperUser, MetaSO does this new StackExchange
really not fit into any of the above?

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m_myers
Web app questions definitely don't belong on SO (unless you're developing
them) or SF (unless you're administering them). They might work on SU, but
they've been explicitly banned for some time. And Meta is only for discussing
the SO network. So no, there's really no other place in the existing network
for them.

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blasdel
The segregation actually isn't so bad the more I think about it -- people with
tons of karma from questions about mundane windows sysadmin and inane
adolescent theming shouldn't be running roughshod over people trying to figure
out how to do something in gmail.

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mwsherman
That's right. The segmentation is about making sure that each site has a
critical mass of experts, and enough of a focus that said experts won't be
annoyed by off-topic questions. (Of course it's debatable where the line
should be.)

Joel and Jeff have said several times that "Google is the UI". So the
segmentation doesn't hurt the "answer consumers", who'll come in through
Google with little regard for which site is which, while benefiting the
"producers", who do care.

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jusob
Unfortunately this does not cover questions like "how to do get information X
from Google Adsense or Google Analytics". Anybody knows a good place for such
questions?

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mwsherman
<http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/894/pro-webmasters>

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spolsky
If you're interested in the pro webmasters site, it's likely to go into closed
beta in a matter of days... you should commit to the site today so that you
can participate in the closed beta. The closed beta will be 7 days long after
which we open the beta to the public.

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kleiba
What a rip-off of metaoptimize!!

j/k :-)

