[development] Drupal Answers: A Stackoverflow/StackExchange site proposal

[Josh Koenig]

Stew,

Thanks for starting this thread. This is important stuff:

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/2978/drupal-answers

I want to put my support behind this proposal and explain my thinking in
doing so.

The Drupal community is already growing faster than Drupal's infrastructure
can easily support. With the release of D7 and all the other associated
projects getting off the ground, drupal.org is increasingly often a
bottleneck or blocker. We have wonderful hosts from OSUOSL, but the human
resources needed to develop, maintain and manage our own infrastructure
(which is a 24x7x365 job) are limited.

We have to pick our battles. I much would rather see energy, effort,
attention and money poured into continuing to improve our git and module
infrastructure — which is much more deeply intrinsic to the health and
future of the project — and accept that even though we *can* build our own
StackOverflow (@eaton proved this already) that doesn't necessarily mean
it's the best use of limited resources, or the best thing for the project.

Drupal can theoretically/technically solve a lot of its own problems, but I
think we often suffer from a "not built here" prejudice as a result. In the
realm of getting good quality answers to Drupal questions out to the most
people possible, I can't see how a StackExchange site would do anything but
help. I would love to see the community embrace something really cool and
useful from the wider Internet as a way to promote the project.

Finally, I should say that I *do not* think a StackExchange answers site
replaces anything. It's not an issue queue, and it's not a replacement for
the dialogue that exist in the forums. I would say it's a new resource,
something that can help the 10s of 1000s of people who will be trying to
wrap their mind around Drupal in the coming year.

Cheers
-josh
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