Today, the guys behind StackExchange (Unity Answer's engine) announced big changes to their business model that affects all sites which use the engine.
Among them is the desire to migrate all existing sites to a free and open format where the users own the questions.
Will Unity continue to use StackExchange? Will this site stay up?
We can operate on the current system for at least another year. The current system allows export of all data (questions,answers,users,reputationpoints, badges), and there are several alternative providers that provide imports of those data dumps. We're still looking at what our best options is. For now, nothing is going to change, we'll keep you updated when something does.
Happy asking & answering :)
From the blog post you linked:
Q: What happens with existing Stack Exchange sites?
We dont want to harm any communities that have already successfully gotten off the ground. This harks back to our corporate goal:
Make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions.
Community is hard to build, and we want to work with you to preserve it if youve already done that with Stack Exchange. If we closed down or competed with the existing, successful Stack Exchange sites, that would conflict with our goals.
- Existing Stack Exchange sites will be kept open, under existing rules, for at least three months, and at least one year if you have an active site (defined as ten or more visitors or more on April 8th).
- You will not have to pay for these sites, ever.
- Well give you at least 3 months notice before shutting down any site.
- Well always make your data available for download.
- If your site remains very active, wed love to work with you to migrate it to the new, community-owned Stack Exchange platform. That would be the best thing that could happen to a Stack Exchange 1.0 site, in our opinion: that way your site can take advantage of our existing resources and expansive community.
Basically, it sounds like since UnityAnswers is an active community, they will most likely leave it alone for a while at least. At worst, they will work to migrate it to the new system, assuming Unity is willing to cooperate (and I don't see any reason they wouldn't be).
Another blog post on Migration of SE 1.0 Sites (which the version of UnityAnswers), including advantages and disadvantages of switching to the SE 2.0 code.
Personally, I think it might be worth migrating (although UT's opinion is the only one that matters :) . There are a lot of cool features in the StackOverflow codebase that are not in the StackExchange codebase (which forked off from SO, and went their own merry way). For instance:
Interview with Lead Developer David Fullerton
Stack Overflow has continued their development separately from Stack Exchange, adding features like improved searching, interface improvements, better notifications and collaboration, and now theyre even talking about a new chat application. Will Stack Exchange get all this new stuff?
David: Yes! We decided that, for SE
2.0, it would actually be easier to start from the Stack Overflow code
base and selectively pull over the
best of the Stack Exchange changes we
made over the months.