An experiment: IF Answers

Alex
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

Pertex
I have a dream... to find one place with all information about Quest, not to search webpage, forum, wiki, twitter, blog, facebook and now ifanswers for news or answers. It seems to be trendy to post every single information at an other trendy site just thinking this would hype a product. Yes, I could think ifanswers could help if it works like a big faq, but only if moderators create the questions and answers. Otherwise you will get lots of posts like "Why is my game not running?" or "Who wants to write my game?"

Alex
We're never going to create the One True Site To Rule Them All - there are different sites for different purposes. And IF Answers is not just about Quest anyway - there's a lot of good information about IF that applies regardless of what development system you're using, so having separate silos makes no sense.

But you're right we will probably need to be quite strict about question and answer quality. I want this site to be full of useful and relevant information, not just a load of "help me fix my game pls" rubbish.

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