A New Site For FFXI Q&A

We have a lot of really great informational sites for FFXI, and various forums for discussion, but right now there's not really an ideal place to go to ask a question. You can certainly just post on a forum (and most people do), but there are lots of issues with this. Forums are meant for discussion more than Q&A. It's hard for people with the same question to find your thread later, and even if they do, they can't quickly evaluate the answer(s) without reading through the whole thread, which can take a lot of time if the thread isn't solely devoted to the question.

In the interest of trying to improve this, I've set up an instance of StackExchange for the purpose of questions related to FFXI. 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, and 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, allowing it to be almost entirely community-moderated by the active users. 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 reputation yet. I'll turn this mode off once I think it's at the point of being able to function with the restrictions on.

Dororo has done a huge job of "importing" a bunch of recent questions and answers from BG, so that we have a base to start with, but the site's really meant to be used actively, and for that we need some users. It's one of those "critical mass" type sites, it'll snowball quickly if we can just get enough active people asking/answering questions for a little while.

So then, how can we get this started? Sign up for an account (not necessary, but recommended), you can either just use an email address and a password, or an OpenID. Then, please read the faq. From there, just start using the site. Have a question? Ask it. See one you know the answer to? Answer it. 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 few other quick notes:

• This isn't a forum replacement, it's not for discussions. It's for answers. Try to ask questions that actually have an answer, not things like "Who is your favorite NPC?"
  

• Yes, it looks pretty bad/generic right now, but I want to see how much interest there is in using this site before I spend a lot of time on it.
  

• I need a name. As part of my quick setup I just went with "FFXI Answers" (to parallel Yahoo Answers, etc), but something more clever (and preferably related to FFXI) would be great. You can make suggestions on the site itself, so that we can have voting and such.
  

• If this does actually take off, I may end up moving to another platform eventually. StackExchange is currently in beta, and probably will be for at least a few more months, but it's likely going to be expensive eventually. All the questions/answers/reputation/etc are fully exportable, so if I need to move to a cheaper/free clone (there are many), nothing will be lost.

Questions/thoughts?

/troll
Invincible Shield.
/endtroll

I like the concept, but there is already a wiki answers thing for FFXI. http://answers.wikia.com/wiki/Category:FFXI

Of course, it's filled with bots and not very efficient.

I think something like this will get a lot more use for 14 when it comes out. Most of the FFXI information is readily available on the wiki or already covered in a lot of forums.

I know the point is find answers without searching forums however I think its pretty late in the game to try to invent a new way to find information for FFXI. I do like the stack overflow website and I've used it for a long time. That style of question/answer/karma(points) is a good way to run a Q&A site.

It's still useful for those that are still new to the game. Believe it or not, people are still picking this game up for the first time. Sure not as many as there used to be but enough to warrant something like this. Also the game isn't dead yet and it won't be for a long time. Even after 14 hits the shelves, I still see 11 being around for years.