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How will Unity Answers respond to the changes to StackExchange in v2.0?
Today, the guys behind StackExchange (Unity Answer's engine) announced big changes to their business model that affects all sites which use the engine.
Among them is the desire to migrate all existing sites to a free and open format where the users own the questions.
Will Unity continue to use StackExchange? Will this site stay up?
Quote from their blog "Fortunately, a recent road trip uncovered a long list of investors who believed in our mission, so we were able to raise enough money to make Stack Exchange absolutely free. (The details of that investment are not quite ready to be announced, but well let you know as soon as they are)." So the point is who owns the them and what they mean that it will belong to the community.???
Of course, if you're looking at this in 2014, Unity of course moved to Unity Answers. Though there is a proposal to make a Unity-Specific stack exchange @ http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/77294/unity3d
You mean, rather, that Unity changed the back end of UnityAnswers to AnswerHub. It used StackExchange originally.
Answer by Lucas Meijer 1 · Apr 14, 2010 at 09:53 AM
We can operate on the current system for at least another year. The current system allows export of all data (questions,answers,users,reputationpoints, badges), and there are several alternative providers that provide imports of those data dumps. We're still looking at what our best options is. For now, nothing is going to change, we'll keep you updated when something does.
Happy asking & answering :)
If ever there was a project asking to be Open-Sourced... $$anonymous$$aybe UT should sponsor one? :)
Well, the "another year" is co$$anonymous$$g to an end soon. I personally prefer answers over the forums, though being able to easily add images and files on the forum is a big plus there. The new SE already allow images, not files. Anyway, just wondering if there are any news on this.
Answer by Stelimar · Apr 13, 2010 at 09:55 PM
From the blog post you linked:
Q: What happens with existing Stack Exchange sites?
We dont want to harm any communities that have already successfully gotten off the ground. This harks back to our corporate goal:
Make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions.
Community is hard to build, and we want to work with you to preserve it if youve already done that with Stack Exchange. If we closed down or competed with the existing, successful Stack Exchange sites, that would conflict with our goals.
- Existing Stack Exchange sites will be kept open, under existing rules, for at least three months, and at least one year if you have an active site (defined as ten or more visitors or more on April 8th).
- You will not have to pay for these sites, ever.
- Well give you at least 3 months notice before shutting down any site.
- Well always make your data available for download.
- If your site remains very active, wed love to work with you to migrate it to the new, community-owned Stack Exchange platform. That would be the best thing that could happen to a Stack Exchange 1.0 site, in our opinion: that way your site can take advantage of our existing resources and expansive community.
Basically, it sounds like since UnityAnswers is an active community, they will most likely leave it alone for a while at least. At worst, they will work to migrate it to the new system, assuming Unity is willing to cooperate (and I don't see any reason they wouldn't be).
Thanks, I hope they stick with it. I'm still hoping to hear from them whether they consider the site a success and if they're willing to conform to StackExchange's new terms.
Answer by Cyclops · Jun 06, 2010 at 06:58 PM
Another blog post on Migration of SE 1.0 Sites (which the version of UnityAnswers), including advantages and disadvantages of switching to the SE 2.0 code.
Personally, I think it might be worth migrating (although UT's opinion is the only one that matters :) . There are a lot of cool features in the StackOverflow codebase that are not in the StackExchange codebase (which forked off from SO, and went their own merry way). For instance:
Interview with Lead Developer David Fullerton
Stack Overflow has continued their development separately from Stack Exchange, adding features like improved searching, interface improvements, better notifications and collaboration, and now theyre even talking about a new chat application. Will Stack Exchange get all this new stuff?
David: Yes! We decided that, for SE 2.0, it would actually be easier to start from the Stack Overflow code base and selectively pull over the best of the Stack Exchange changes we made over the months.