EpicPlan on the way back, EpicAdvice drama…

EpicDNS Fail...

Well, the last blog post said we'd be back fully running this month, and we've been working really hard, just not on any code...

We relocated one of our servers to Linode.com (the one running EpicPlan.com and the blog) almost 2 weeks ago now, and apparently all of our DNS wasn't transferring over properly, so you may have not been able to access EpicPlan.com. The DNS records are all correct as of today and should be telling the rest of the internet where to find us in the next 48hrs or sooner. So EpicPlan will be back up soon!

EpicDrama...

As for the updates on EpicAdvice, we've been tossing ideas around, but a lot of our focus right now is directed at one topic: The StackExchange 2.0 Change (Which I will refer to as SE 2.0 through this post). It's tossed a lot of our plans into the air, as we are not exactly sure how it will impact EpicAdvice. Just keep in mind, we will do whatever is best for the community, to continue to provide EPIC answers to your questions, and keep this community growing.

Basically what's happening is FogCreek, the makers of the software we are using to power EpicAdvice.com, is changing their business model to one that doesn't mesh too well with our current plans for EpicAdvice. They are calling it SE 2.0 and are no longer going to offer a "you pay for the service and start your own site", everything is being converted into a new social format and financially backed by Venture Capitalists.

The new process is very democratic... Users propose a topic they'd like to see a site opened about (ie World of Warcraft), the community starts gathering supporters and moderators, a "beta" site will be launched to monitor performance of the topic, and then FogCreek will launch and pay for a site on that topic as long as its successful. It's a great idea on paper and great for people who want to try to establish a community for those topics, except the fact that FogCreek will own all of the sites at that point (well, technically the community will, but FogCreek will be the ones calling the shots), pushing the entrepreneurs and developers (like Gnarf and I) out of the equation.

I mean, its a good change for the StackExchange community, its just bad for those of us that have spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of programming developing on their platform. This change will allow FogCreek to monetize the StackExchange sites (like EpicAdvice.com) and continue to pay the developers of the software, making it better for everyone running these sites. We just wouldn't be as heavily involved anymore if we convert our site to a SE 2.0 site, nor would we be the ones developing the brand/product. However, we have some choices, and don't HAVE to migrate to SE 2.0.

Don't worry, this isn't an imminent change! EpicAdvice.com will remain as it is for atleast 1 full year from now.

EpicAdvice.com generates enough traffic that FogCreek simply isn't going to turn us off and restart, they are giving us 1-year of free hosting on their StackExchange platform, without changes. We are very thankful to them for this, and after that year, no one knows what will happen (not even them). They could shut it off, take over the site and implement a community management scheme, develop a new site or just send us our data and tell us to move elsewhere. There's so many possible outcomes, no one knows exactly what is going on.

This is the fork in the road that we are contemplating now, we have a few options which we are still discussing. I figured I would take a moment and briefly explain what exactly is going on in our heads, what we've though of and what we are considering doing.

Here are the options that we can see so far....

1) Migrate EpicAdvice.com into the SE 2.0 Infrastructure...

The most obvious path choice is just to migrate EA into their new democratic process. In my mind, this is the "I give up" or "sell-out" move, as we would be relinquishing all control of EpicAdvice to the "Community" that already exists and FogCreek's staff would support them. This process isn't set in stone, and we have no idea what they'd do as far as establishing "moderators" and contributors to the site. Most likely all of our customizations would cease to exist (item-linking, character linking, profiles, factions, etc) and the new moderators wouldn't have as much of an idea on what should or shouldn't be asked... between Gnarf and I, you'd be hard pressed to find 2 other developers that know World of Warcraft as well as we do. It's up in the air as to what would happen, as no one knows, but we'd rather not go this route.

There's also a possibility that we -may- be able to recoup some of our loses(time + money) going this route, but we'd still come out in the negative most likely. For those of you that hang out with us in IRC, you know we sit and pound on code/improvements for EpicAdvice like its our job. Gnarf and I also moderate and edit lots of posts daily, making sure the quality of questions/answers on the site is up-to-par with gramar, tags, and punctuation. It would be a rough transition, but it could turn out alright, I'm not saying it's going to be a horrible process, its just the main concern from us as developers is that we don't want to lose the last 7 months of work we put into the site for nothing... EpicAdvice is our brain-child right now and we don't want to just let it go... (we'd also like to think that you guys appreciate the work were doing!)

2) Migrate EpicAdvice.com into another Open-Source platform...

We've found some pretty good other Q&A engines out there, like Shapado and OSQA. These platforms look very, very similar to what we have now, but both of them are missing some pretty key features that we would need to implement and keep it running just like it is now... I won't bore you with the details of the other systems, but suffice to say, they are close to StackExchange, but not quite there yet. Most likely migrating to a new system would involve loss of some of our content, perhaps some of our "Google" power (ie showing up in search results) and probably cause a LOT of headaches with users not transferring over... the whole process seems like SUCH a headache.

Migrating to another platform however would be a permanant solution, once we moved to a new platform (an open-source one), we probably would never have to move again, and we could contribute development time towards that platform as well. Sounds pretty good, but as I will explain a bit in the next section, it would cut a lot of development time out of EpicPlan and our other side projects.

3) Migrate EpicAdvice.com into a completely new system of our own design...

Pretty self explanatory... but the problem is... it would take soooo much time and money to get a system like this off the ground. We were trying to devote a lot of time to EpicPlan.com until this came up, and if we went with this option, development on EpicPlan.com would essentially stop for a while. That isn't too appealing of an option, as we see a lot of potential in EpicPlan, just like EpicAdvice. EpicAdvice up until now was the easy site to run and develop for, because everything we did was all "Ease of Use" and "Improvement" features, as opposed to "Core Features" that are required for the site to run.

However, if we could possibly go this route, we could expand into a LOT of features that people were asking for. The StackExchange platform had some limitations that wouldn't let us customize and do some of the things that you provided as feedback, like changing the badges to achievements, theming them to "Epic/Rare/etc" and integrations of a lot more game-themed things.

So in conclusion...

We've done a lot of thinking, and got a lot of thinking to do, what we want to do, the direction of the site, and how much of a workload we can handle to accomplish all of this. EpicAdvice has been growing leaps and bounds and our community is flourishing, serving over 2,000 unique people a day, and we want to keep it that way. Whatever direction we choose in the end will be what we consider the best for the community and the site itself. World of Warcraft needs a powerful Q&A site like this to help guide people to the proper answers to those tough questions!  Special thanks to all of those out there that have supported us this far, we'd have given up by now if the community wasn't so great, and we will try to keep you in the loop on what kind of decisions we are making in the future.

Sound off in the comments if you have any input or ideas

On the Epic-Front, all is Quiet…

We posted a header message with essentially the same thoughts as here, but I just wanted to take a bit to put up a blog post and let you know what's going on in the inner-workings of our lil' team.

Not many changes have happened over the past months, February/March has been a few crazy months for our team. We've been busy working on a few projects that actually make money as well as our full-time jobs. So we haven't really had a chance to assemble and crank out some quality code for our tiny network of WoW advice. That soon will change!

Mid to Late April we are planning on pushing ahead at a more steady pace, we have a few updates for EpicAdvice that we want to roll out, including a new navigation system, a better sidebar for the homepage (instead of a tag cloud that takes up 2 pages) and perhaps a few others. EpicPlan is still heavily under development and we are going to be performing a lot of "backend" style changes to the code to make it more streamlined and effective, as well as re-create the menu system for the "Map Picker" and re-organize the interface to make it easier to use. We have an entire project tracker for each website filled to the brim with ideas of what we want to do next.

So please bear with us as we finish off this month and the beginning of the next, then we will be a lot more active in the community once more. As always, your feedback is HUGE when it comes to helping is come up with improvements, so take a moment to let us know if you have any ideas.

Thanks,

EpicAdvice.com Team