Friday, October 1, 2010

Stack Exchange Update (with chat)

Traffic on the RPG site Stack Exchange has leveled off. But there is a steady stream of questions and answers on a variety of topics. I realize that many of you are not keen on the whole being able to edit other people stuff. But the moderators are up and running (I am one of them) and we dealt with a few situations already. So you may want to stop by and give it another try. Plus there are now history features that allow you see to see the edits being made and tools to manage those edits.

In addition they added a chat room to the site. The software behind it is pretty good in my opinion. I like how you can pop in and see the previous conversation as far back as you want to go. You can set up rooms of your own with the tools there. It is a new feature so feedback is appreciated.

Note that the questions are dominated by D&D 4e which can be off-putting to many readers of this blog. However questions about other RPGs have been answered and unlike system centric these questions tend not to be crusted with opinions proponents of other systems. The tag system allows you to filter out all the questions you don't want to see. And one good thing about how Stack Exchange works is that people put a lot work into making sure the tags for questions are accurate.

6 comments:

Badmike said...

I like the Exchange a lot. But it's VERY D&D 4E oriented and as such there is not much info I can contribute (or info I can use).

Scott said...

What Badmike said. After trying it out, I didn't see any reason to use Stack Exchange instead of a more specialized forum or the blogosphere.

migellito said...

Agreed.. but I do like the idea. I wouldn't mind if someone in our realm of the blogoverse did something similar in relation to the OSR.

I'm even more intrigued by what I thought I was going to see when clicking the link. For some reason (low blood sugar maybe?), I thought it was going to be a site where dozens of DM's contributed to, modified and discussed a massive collaborative DnD game setting. Kind of like Thieve's World, but for gaming instead of literature.

I don't have the web-chops to set it up, but maybe one of us out there does?

Jerry said...

Note that you can ignore tags. I've ignored dnd4.0 and the rest of stack exchange is much more manageable.

Nope said...

The problem I've noticed is that very few non 4e gamers are posting up questions. If you look at user stats, it is 4e gamers who are asking questions, while many of those who play other editions/games seem to focus on answering questions.

Simple solution: ask more questions.

Dirk said...

The chat functionality looks interesting, although you need to have 100 reputation to create a chat room of your own (and only StackExchange users with 20+ reputation can post).

I've been looking for a replacement for Google Wave, which my group uses to play-by-post between sessions. I wonder if they'd consider adding a die rolling bot?