I've believed for some time that it would be great if we had a Stack Exchange site for Interactive Fiction - i.e. a site where questions and answers can be voted on and edited by the community (like
Stack Overflow).
There have been a
couple of attempts at getting an Interactive Fiction Stack Exchange site set up, but they didn't get enough traction to get going.
It's kind of a chicken-and-egg thing really. I think an IF Q&A site would only gain momentum after it started existing, but there aren't enough of us who really "get" the idea yet to get one started via the Stack Exchange Area 51 process. (And even though I happen to be an employee of Stack Exchange myself, I have no influence over what sites get set up).
Fortunately, there's an open source platform called
Question2Answer which allows you to create Stack Exchange-style sites.
So I've set up an experimental new site called
IF Answers. It's a Q&A site for Interactive Fiction.
This means that questions about Quest, QuestKit, Squiffy, Inform, Adrift, TADS, Twine etc. will all be on-topic. Non-technical questions about things like IF game design will be on-topic too.
There are other areas that would probably also be on-topic - questions about specific games, questions about entering the IF Comp etc.
If the experiment works, all questions about Quest, QuestKit and Squiffy would be posted to IF Answers instead of this forum. This would provide a much more useful, searchable resource than trying to hunt through the forum archives for answers. The forums will still exist for general discussion and debate, but specific answerable questions would belong on IF Answers.
Anyway, let me know what you think! The site is currently totally blank, as I've only just set it up. I will probably populate it with some sample questions and answers over the next few days, and announce it more widely when there's actually some content there.
Check it out...
ifanswers.com