FFXI Q&A Site Trial - Need Users

[Deimos]

There's an amazing amount of knowledge about the game locked up in the "Random Question" threads here, but it's almost totally inaccessible because... it's in the Random Question threads. This causes the same questions to get asked repeatedly, and the answers to be difficult to find later.

I'd like to try a different approach. I've set up an instance of StackExchange for the purpose of FFXI questions. You can find it here:

http://ffxi.stackexchange.com

If you'd like to see how this looks on a running site, you can have a look at EpicAdvice, which is using it for WoW questions. If you want to see how it looks in a really high-usage situation, you can look at the original site on this platform, StackOverflow (programming questions).

Basically, people ask questions, other people answer them. Users can vote answers up or down, and the person that asked the question can choose to accept an answer. Having your questions/answers voted up and accepted causes you to gain reputation points. The higher your reputation, the more privileges you gain on the site, this is explained on the FAQ page. I've currently got the site in "bootstrap mode" which removes some of the reputation-related restrictions that stop you from voting/etc until you have rep. This is in order to help it get started, it doesn't work well when nobody has any rep. I'll turn this off once I think it's at the point of being able to function with the restrictions on.

So then, how can we get this started? Sign up for an account, you can either just use an email address and a password, or an OpenID. Then, please read the faq. I need people to try and add some of the most common questions, the ones that get asked over and over. Another good idea would be adding some recent questions from the latest thread that haven't been answered yet. Start answering the questions, vote each other up/down as relevant, try to come up with good tags for categorizing questions so they can be found later, etc. I think the site is pretty intuitive to use, and there's good information in the FAQ, but let me know if you have any questions.

A couple other things I should note:

1. StackExchange is currently in beta, which is free. After the beta ends (which will probably still be at least a month), I'll have 45 days worth of "trial time". When that time ends, I have to make a decision, which will be based entirely on how well this gets going. StackExchange isn't cheap ($129/month), so depending what level of use the site gets before that point, I'll decide between:
   
   • Scrap it, failed experiment.
   • Pay for it, probably try to offset my costs with donations/advertising
   • Export all the data (this will be permitted) and import it into a free clone like Shapado - similar functionality, much less cost
   
   It all depends how this experiment goes, but I think the site could be extremely useful.
   
2. Yes, I realize that the site looks like crap, and that there is placeholder text all over the place. I just signed up quickly, cropped a logo, and kept the default colorscheme/layout/etc. I'll improve it over the next little while, but I also don't want to spend a lot of time on it if it seems like nobody's interested in it. Same sort of thing as above, if people start using it, I'll take it more seriously. You know, give it an actual name (suggestions?), a logo, buy a domain name, that sort of stuff.

I really hope that there's interest in this, it would make a lot of the great information on this site a lot more accessible. Forums are excellent for discussion, but don't work particularly well for Q&A.

Questions/thoughts?

[Hegarty]

Dead game, 4 years too late.

[Eanae]

Not worth it.

[TheMysteriousX]

Should have a reasonable amount of information in it in about 5 years time.

[Draylo]

Saying "dead game" the new thing now?

[The Stig]

$129/month is a massive rip off for what this is on first impression that can be accomplished similarly using a simple forum software (i.e. phpBB) and cheap hosting with a minor bit of modding.

EDIT: To add what I mean, what you've got there is basically 1 forum which allows people to post questions, instead of condensing it into 1 thread, with a ratings/voting system. I don't see anything which makes this awesome, and eventually this will still suck because people don't bother to search (which is the core of the problem). How some are using this and paying I don't know.

With some effort, proper use of tagging and an enhanced search query/engine I'm sure a similar solution can be produced with forum software.

EDIT 2: replaced "minor effort" with "effort", it's been a while and I've not coded a search thing for a while, just recalled how tricky it was.

And to add one more thing, something similar to Google's search, where it tries to guess your search, would be handy.

As for a tag system, it can be split into various stuff, i.e. low level, mid level, endgame, then into its own categories of weapons (types), armor (slots), situation (events). But yeh this is where it all gets complex. But as people have said, it's too late, kinda.

Perhaps you could set one up when FFXIV gets released?

[Deimos]

Should have a reasonable amount of information in it in about 5 years time.

This would be relevant if it was trying to replace FFXIclopedia, but it's not. The amount of information isn't really important. The point is just to replace the random question threads. I guess the difference is that it shouldn't be "where to go to look up information" (at least at first), it should be "where to go to ask a question". When you start writing a question, the site tries to detect similar questions, so it'll even attempt to head off all the people that can't handle searching (by doing it for them automatically).

$129/month is a massive rip off for what this is on first impression that can be accomplished similarly using a simple forum software (i.e. phpBB) and cheap hosting with a minor bit of modding.

EDIT: To add what I mean, what you've got there is basically 1 forum which allows people to post questions, instead of condensing it into 1 thread, with a ratings/voting system. I don't see anything which makes this awesome, and eventually this will still suck because people don't bother to search (which is the core of the problem). How some are using this and paying I don't know.

With some minor effort, proper use of tagging and an enhanced search query/engine I'm sure a similar solution can be produced with forum software.

Agreed, it's definitely overpriced. I'm hoping they'll add a lower pricing option before they go live, there's been a lot of discussion about this. The beta is free, so there isn't anybody "using this and paying" yet. But if they don't (and anyone actually cares about this site) I'll most likely go with the dump-database/import-into-free-clone method. I don't mind at all paying for the superior version of something (for example, why do people pay for vBulletin when PHPBB is free?), as long as it's reasonable. The time you save by not having to fight with a hunk of crap all the time makes up for the money. The reason I didn't start with an open-source clone is that StackExchange is superior to all of them (at least for now), it was the quickest to set up, and it's just as free.

I definitely wouldn't say that you can do it easily with modded forum software, it would have to be modded so much that it was basically rewritten. Might as well just go with something built for that purpose in the first place (and there are many StackOverflow clones, with varying levels of features).

[Argettio]

Looks good.

I will troll it now and again to see if there is anything I can answer.

[Deimos]

Although the dead game comments can go to hell, I kinda have to agree with this. I think this would have been awesome 2-3 years ago, and at this point most of everyone knows a good chunk of the information out there.

Maybe save your energy for FFXIV? Just get it started at launch, and watch it grow :D!?!?

I have this strange feeling that I'm going to be repeating myself a lot in here regarding the purpose of this.

If there was no use for this, and "most of everyone knows a good chunk of the information", the latest Random Question thread wouldn't have 847 posts in 3 weeks. People still ask questions constantly about things that they can't easily look up (and things that they can). The What's Better thread is also the same sort of thing, and has 875 in a little over a month. Between the two, you're looking at about 45 posts per day. It's definitely not slow.

And there's a lot of things that just don't work well in the thread format. What questions were asked that never got answered? There's no way to tell except to painstakingly go through the entire thread manually. Sometimes a question gets pages of response, but someone with the same question later has no easy way to tell what the right or best answers were, without taking the time to read through the entire discussion (while filtering out posts related to other questions that are mixed in). And that's if they can even find that discussion in the first place, which isn't always easy.

Getting the StackExchange site actually started is a little tricky though, it's one of those "critical mass" problems. If there's nobody there asking questions, nobody's going to hang around waiting to answer them. If there's nobody on the site to answer questions, why would anyone ask something there instead of here? It just needs a decent number of people to start using it, and it would snowball.

Honestly though, I don't really care if anyone ends up using it. It's not like this was my pet project that I'm unveiling after months of work. It took me a grand total of 25 minutes to set it up and post here about it. Just thought that it might be nice, but if people would rather keep dumping information into the black hole of the random question threads, it doesn't hurt my feelings.

[Khajit]

It would be easier to just read the thread and categorize the questions while putting the answers to the faq's in a spoiler tag or something.

[Bikpik]

Although the dead game comments can go to hell, I kinda have to agree with this. I think this would have been awesome 2-3 years ago, and at this point most of everyone knows a good chunk of the information out there.

Maybe save your energy for FFXIV? Just get it started at launch, and watch it grow :D!?!?

If everyone knew a good chunk of the information out there, the gimp thread would be dead too.

[EternalSnow]

it's the yahoo answers of final fantasy XI!

[Xavier]

Sounds like a good idea if you can cut the cost and find enough people interested in helping to sort out all the questions. While this would have been particularly nice to have several years ago, I think it still has some value today.

Obviously of no particular use to the people on these forums however, since everyone here is omniscient.

[Deimos]

It would be easier to just read the thread and categorize the questions while putting the answers to the faq's in a spoiler tag or something.

If by "easier" you mean "do a shitload of manual work, constant maintenance forever, and end up not fixing any of the issues with using a forum for Q&A" then yes, that's easier.

Sounds like a good idea if you can cut the cost and find enough people interested in helping to sort out all the questions. While this would have been particularly nice to have several years ago, I think it still has some value today.

StackExchange's cost is definitely pretty high, but I don't think it's totally finalized. They're trying to use "pageviews" as the sole metric of what they'll charge, and I don't think that's feasible for many reasons, so they might end up changing it. Really though, $129/month isn't bad for a decently popular site, BG is paying over $400/month if I recall correctly.

As I mentioned, since StackExchange offers the database-dump option, it's easy to move everything to a cheaper or free version if the cost ends up being a problem. I came across Coordino today, which looks like quite a good clone, and is $79 for a single domain.

[Jeryhn]

Saying "dead game" the new thing now?

Saying "dead game" was the cool thing to do in 2005.

[Kaylia]

It's a nice concept, but I'm afraid that to be successful, it would require a lot of traffic. Generating this kind of traffic without huge database like wiki, ffxiah or w/e wouldn't be easy. If you can get it to work, it could be another useful website to add to bookmark. That said, you should keep the idea in mind for ffxiv, you have a better chance to create something succesful with a new game, than one with many established website.

Obviously of no particular use to the people on these forums however, since everyone here is omniscient.

rofl

[Kegsay]

Pretty good instead of searching the "Random Question" threads I think.

[millionsknives]

It's a good idea, if only we had it earlier. There must be a cheaper system out there?