[hrothgar]

Over the past few months, I've been spending a fair bit of time on discussion forums like Stack Overflow and Cross Validated.

From my perspective, these forums offer a number of nice features that address many of the issues that BBF has encountered over the years. I would (respectfully) suggest that there might be some value to switching over to forum software that offered the same type of capabilities.

From my perspective, there are two key enhancements that the stack overflow system offers.
The first (and the subject of this post) is a "real" reputation system.

Simply put, the site is design such that the more reputation you have, the more privileges that you accrue.

Some privileges (like the ability to create a post / ask a question) require almost no reputation.
Other privileges - say the ability to access moderator tools require enormous amounts of reputation.

There are three different ways to accrue reputation, each of which is essentially based on providing high quality content.

1. If you post a question / answer that gets upvoted, you gain a small amount of reputation.
2. If the individual who originally posted a question "accepts" your answer, you get a larger chunk of reputation
3. Some questions have bounties placed on them... (Other users can use some of their reputation as an incentive to get people to provide a quality answer to their question). Providing a good answer to a question with a high bounty can be very remunerative.

You also get small amounts of reputation by editing your posts and the like.

Attached you'll see the complete set of privileges available on the Cross Validated blog...
(I just gained the ability to vote down posts, which actually costs reputation)

Note the ability to create tags...
This is the subject of my next post.

126
Privileges
trusted user 0%
protect questions 0%
access to moderator tools 1%
approve tag wiki edits 2%
cast close and reopen votes 4%
create tag synonyms 5%
edit questions and answers 6%
create gallery chat rooms 12%
established user 12%
retag questions 25%
create tags 42%
view close votes 50%
vote down 100%
create chat rooms 100%
edit community wiki 100%
set bounties 100%
comment everywhere 100%
talk in chat 100%
flag posts 100%
vote up 100%
create wiki posts 100%
remove new user restrictions 100%
participate in meta 100%
create posts

[hrothgar]

Tags are another really nice feature on Cross Validated.

To some extend, tags serve as a substitute for the various forums on BBO.

When you create a post, you have the option to "tag" it with one or more descriptors. For example, someone might afix tags like

"declarer play"
"squeeze"

to a post asking about the best line to take.

I personally never really use the forum views on BBO, however, I find myself using the tag system on Cross Validated all the time.
I think that it provides a better way to organize the information...

[ArtK78]

Getting privileges based on "reputation" might make sense on a free-standing Forum run entirely by the members, but it makes little sense on a Forum run by an organization (such as BBO) giving access to its members but retaining oversight responsibilities.

[barmar]

 hrothgar, on 2012-April-12, 12:01, said:

Tags are another really nice feature on Cross Validated.

Tags were added in IP.Board 3.2, but we're still running 3.1. 3.3 was released recently, and it has at least one fix to a problem we reported (the time zone issue in Australia/NZ), so I expect we'll upgrade in the not too distant future.

[mgoetze]

I think the Stack Overflow format would work better for "what should I do with this hand" type questions and worse for everything else. Note that one of the primary features is that the highest-rated answer gets shown first.

[y66]

Anything that makes it easier for people to find what they're looking for would be good for our game and for this forum.

It sounds like tags will help make it easier to find stuff.

It is generally pretty easy to find high quality answers to what seem like esoteric programming problems on stackoverflow.

[Hanoi5]

Why not?

[Antrax]

On the side of "why not", I generally don't like the atmosphere in Stack Overflow-style communities. I might not be alone in this. Tags is a good idea. The rest isn't, IMO.

[barmar]

I wasn't familiar with these sites, so I just went to stackoverflow.com to see what it's like. Am I mistaken, or is there no organization into sub-forums, like we have here (and pretty much every other online forum I've used)? Do you have to use tags to restrict your view to categories? Doesn't that mean that everyone has to be careful to tag their posts properly?

[mgoetze]

 barmar, on 2012-April-15, 17:58, said:

Doesn't that mean that everyone has to be careful to tag their posts properly?

I believe other people can tag your questions also.

[Cthulhu D]

Stackoverflow is rubbish imho if you are trying to 'discuss' something, but great for Q&A style stuff. We have a mix of both.

Tags are money for jam, but unless they are well used by the community you don't get much out of them.

[barmar]

It also looks to me like Stack Overflow is better when there are objectively "right" and "wrong" answers. But except maybe in the beginner forum, most issues here involve significant judgement and opinion. Just because a post gets more upvotes doesn't necessarily make it the right answer. And if posts are presented in order of liking, that will mess up the flow of conversation.

All in all, it doesn't seem like it's the right model for these forums.