Life In 19x19

EDIT: Shidogo's Q/A will be discontinued, but that doesn't mean the end of the website itself! Read more here

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Hello, I am the owner of shidogo.com. I have been posting around the internet yesterday and today trying to save my website.

You can read the backstory here. In short, yesterday I received an email saying Shidogo will expire next Monday for inactivity. However, we only need 10 active users to keep the website alive.

If you are willing, please help me spread the word about shidogo.com. Sign up, invite your Go-playing friends to sign up, and ask and answer questions before it's too late (monday!)

Thanks for reading, and I hope my website can help the Go community out,
-Gilbert

p.s. If you have any suggestions about the website I'll be happy to take them

Hmmm ... it's interesting that you're trying to use the Stack Exchange system for this. I'm not sure it's very well suited as a medium for Go discussion. I've joined, but I don't think it'll last. Don't get me wrong, with a dedicated community you could probably get this going. However, despite Jeff's aversion to it, seeding the site with questions is likely the best tool you have to gain interest and user-base ... and I see only 17 questions on the site, and I can't for the life of me think of anything truly interesting to ask in that particular medium.

What you need to do is prove that the site offers something that Go players can't get from an existing Internet Communication Medium (I'm going to refer to these as ICMs now).

When Jeff and Joel started their SO idea, it was because the existing ICMs fell short in a very specific way. Since you've gotten involved in the Stack Exchange beta, I suspect you've seen the pseudo-Venn diagram used to show the niche SO technology fills. If not, I'll bring it over here:



The technology has been designed around these four ideas (see this post on Jeff's blog for more details). In order to make your site work (and I'm not convinced there really is a way to shoehorn Go questions and answers effectively into the SE medium), you need to leverage the advantages it was built to provide. Prove to the community that the existing ICMs are insufficient for SOME aspect of providing Go information, and you'll get somewhere with the site.

I'm sorry if I sound harsh at all ... it's not meant to be. I offer my support and have joined. I just think we already have better tools available to the go playing community as a whole.

You make an interesting point. I originally wanted shidogo to be a Q/A about board positions, such as this post, for example. I think it works well (you get the nice bonus of being able to comment on answers), but obviously it needs some changes, as SE was not meant for Go. I tried to overcome these changes by making it easy to add a board to your post by simply copy/pasting a link. Still, there is room for improvement.

Regardless if this site expires or not, I still want to create a solution for discussing Go games collaboratively online. I think there is plenty room for improvement in this area, and needs a seriously good UI to pull it off. I'll have to think deeply about this one...

I have some tentative design plans for just such a site ... modeled on the Malkovich games in this forum, actually. If I ever get the design doc going, I'll pass it along.