Q and A site for boating

[barrymac]

Anyone who knows any stackexchange site knows how well they do in terms of providing quick and accurate answers to questions.

They do however need support in order to get a site off the ground.

Please head over there and show your support to get this site off the ground!

Boating - Area 51 - Stack Exchange

[GordMay]

Area 51 has 21 followers.
CruisersForum has 144,534 members, several thousand of whom are on line at any given time.

[tworail]

Area 51 is an incubator of sorts to determine the feasibility of launching an actual forum dedicated to sailing/boating/whatever, so it cannot be compared to the userbase of CF in that sense, especially at this stage. Also, StackExchange is a completely different format than a typical discussion forum. Eric's summation of how SE works is in the blog post below.

It is also worth noting that StackExchange discussions are not owned by a private entity such as SocialKnowledge. This site could close tomorrow for good and there would be nothing anyone could do about it. That is unlikely of course, but it's a fact.

All that said, an attempt was made at establishing a similar stack by someone a last year and it didn't work out, unfortunately.

Rebel Heart - Eric's Blog - sailing and stackoverflow make a frankensteinÂ*

[GordMay]

Greetings and welcome aboard the CF, tworail.

[barrymac]

Originally Posted by GordMay

Area 51 has 21 followers.
CruisersForum has 144,534 members, several thousand of whom are on line at any given time.

Stack Exchange has 10s of millions of users and the original site has passed 11 million questions. It's become such a reference in it's industry that recruiters will consider a profile on there when evaluating candidates for a job. That proposal however does need support.

A forum is one thing, A Q and A site that is optimised for getting fast and accurate answers to questions is an entirely different thing.

They serve totally different purposes and are not in any way mutually exclusive.

The stack overflow model was developed because wading through meandering pages and pages of debate, rhetoric and or flame wars and trolling is far from an optimal way to learn the answer to your question.

I posted because the proposal needs more support for them to run the beta and I know how valuable a service the model provides.

[barrymac]

Support is growing slowly but steadily. Please add your sensible question to get it out of Beta!

[Shrew]

Keep in mind, this site is funding through advertising. Advertising cost is justified by potential revenue based on volume and user base. You are essentially campaigning to drive member usage of this site to that site.

Kind of like walking into a restaurant and campaigning to get people to go to a competing restaurant.

That is kind of in poor taste.

[barrymac]

Nope.

As I said above before, a forum is one thing, A Q and A site that is optimised for getting fast and accurate answers to questions is an entirely different thing.

They serve totally different purposes and are not in any way mutually exclusive.

[Sea Dreaming]

I have not used stack exchange. But on CF I can evaluate the quality of the responses I receive to my questions. I spend enough time reading posts here to know who is likely to have valuable in put and who is full of hot air.

[Steadman Uhlich]

Originally Posted by Sea Dreaming

I have not used stack exchange. But on CF I can evaluate the quality of the responses I receive to my questions. I spend enough time reading posts here to know who is likely to have valuable in put and who is full of hot air.

And if more CF members took a few minutes to write and post an "About Me" description of their personal sailing experience on their CF personal Profile page, that would help too.

I think CF has a good model, and if members and visitors took the time to add to the free Cruising Wiki, and learned to use the Google Custom Search feature (found under the search menu on each page of a browser window), they would find many answers that may have already been posted here.

And, CF is a good virtual community of sailors helping other sailors. And the CF site has a team of knowlegable, experienced, and fair sailors serving as the Moderators.

[Stu Jackson]

Originally Posted by barrymac

A forum is one thing, A Q and A site that is optimised for getting fast and accurate answers to questions is an entirely different thing.

They serve totally different purposes and are not in any way mutually exclusive.

I went and read rebel heart's link.

In it he includes this:

On the stackexchange world, you spend time crafting a proper answer, supporting it with links, references, and source material. It's just different.

Well, not it's not.

I've been providing links to answers to repeatedly recurring questions ever since I joined CF years ago. Many others have, too, because answering the same old questions gets, well, tiresome. I have invested some of my time collecting links to very good answers to recurring questions in the "101 Topics" that I reference frequently. Those are located on our C34 website, instead of either my own website or blog, neither of which I ever started, since that website will long outlast me.

Or we avoid answering because, as steady hand has many times reminded us, this and many other forums have great search engines. There was an electrical question just the other day which indicated that the OP, who was embarking on a total electrical retrofit, didn't know squat about electricity, but wasn't willing to learn. Reading any single basic boat electrical book would have answered his question. Many replies pointed this out to him.

Starting yet another boating forum, regardless of the purported reasons, be they technical or bits&bytes, is like reinventing the wheel.

[barrymac]

Originally Posted by Sea Dreaming

I spend enough time reading posts here to know who is likely to have valuable in put and who is full of hot air.

Originally Posted by Steady Hand

if members and visitors took the time to add to the free Cruising Wiki, and learned to use the Google Custom Search feature

Yes, time, if only we had more of that. I would argue that time is better spent enjoying solutions than entertaining opinion.

Originally Posted by Stu Jackson

I went and read rebel heart's link.
Starting yet another boating forum, regardless of the purported reasons, be they technical or bits&bytes, is like reinventing the wheel.

It's not a forum. There are no discussion threads. Discussions are actively avoided. Opinion is discouraged, establishment of facts are encouraged. It's more epistemological.

I'm not hating on discussion forums, this one or others, for discussion or debate but they are not optimised for Q & A.

[DDabs]

All of the questions on that site seem to be open to discussion though, just sayin

[barrymac]

Originally Posted by DDabs

All of the questions on that site seem to be open to discussion though, just sayin

Excellent, you clearly have something to offer! That's where you can down vote the ones that lead to ambiguity, opinion and discussion.

Vote up the ones you think are actually helping and ask some better ones that are based on evidence and lead to clarity and building repeatable facts. That's how your experience and knowledge can help the rest of the world.

Just for the record, I have no affiliation whatsoever and I am absolutely not trying to steal attention away. I love CF and will continue to be a member here regardless.

[Jdege]

Originally Posted by DDabs

All of the questions on that site seem to be open to discussion though, just sayin

In a Stack Exchange site, all questions are open to improvement. That's not really the same thing as open to discussion.

As individuals gain reputation, by people upvoting their questions or answers, they gain moderation abilities to do a number of things, including the ability to clean up other people's questions, delete off-topic answers, etc.

Think what it would like, for example, if we had a place where someone could ask about how to properly declare a shotgun, when entering the Bahamas, where answers could be restricted only to those by people who had actually done it?