Today the new “Programming Q&A” site Stack Overflow launches. With the large tech crowd that follows founders Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software) and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), this new site should have no problem building an audience of its own.
According to the About page:
Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site that’s free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain old HTML, no fake rot13 text on the home page, no scammy google-cloaking tactics, no salespeople, no JavaScript windows dropping down in front of the answer asking for $12.95 to go away. You can register if you want to collect karma and win valuable flair that will appear next to your name, but otherwise, it’s just free. And fast. Very, very fast.
Questions and answers are coming in at a steady stream right now. Seems to be a race to answer questions as quickly as possible. They’ve also implemented a reputation score system that rises as you perform various activities on the site. As your reputation score rises, your ability to do things like voting answers up/down and editing questions goes up as well.
The eventual goal for the site is to become the best reference site for programming questions. It’ll be interesting to see if their answers can bubble up in search results to get past all the other poor sites that are out there now. (Tip: Add “stack overflow” to your list of browser search providers. Works for Firefox 3, but not IE7 at the moment.)
