FAQ

Do you know about this other project that's doing something similar?
Possibly! We have been pointed at a number of them. You can see our table of comparisons between our project and others at Similar projects.

Note that we are specifically trying to build a site which is free/open, including open data accessible via API. Most of the sites people point us at do not offer this.

Have you considered supporting the site through ads?
Yes, but we decided not to. See Why no ads?.

Have you considered importing $data_source
Yes, but it's probably quite difficult. See Importing data is hard.

Have you considered integrating $discussion_system?
Yes, we looked into a wide variety of Rails-based discussion systems when we first started work. Most were intended to be used standalone, rather than integrating into an existing site; those that were integratable didn't give us much benefit over writing our own, or were missing features we needed, or would have made it hard for us to build in some of the features we want to add in future.

Why don't you just use Stack Overflow?
a) Growstuff is much more than a discussion site. In fact, the main point of Growstuff is not discussion: it's tracking what you're planting, and aggregating data about who's planting what to provide useful information and open data for third-party uses.

b) Stack Overflow is not open source, is written in a completely different language/platform (.Net), and can't be integrated into what we're doing.

Have you considered Discourse?
Yes. It looks like it'll be lovely. However, it's not ready for prime time yet. From their FAQ:


 * Should I switch to Discourse right now?


 * Probably not.


 * Discourse is brand new. Discourse is early beta software, and likely to remain so for many months. Please experiment with it, play with it, give us feedback, submit pull requests – but any consideration of fully adopting Discourse is for people and organizations who are eager to live on the bleeding and broken edge.

We might look at it again in future, when it's more finished, but integrating it into a site that already has a different discussion system would probably be horrific. So the chances are slim. If Discourse had been released 2 years ago, we would have been much more interested.