I think for or-exchange to stay afloat advertising the site is the best option.i'll do it on my blog

First, I too do not think OR-Exchange is in any way a failure. We're just not in a particularly high-volume business.

Second, while I'm all for promoting OR-Exchange, I don't think we want to be in a position where it's continuation depends on some minimum traffic volume or number of committed badge-holders.

Short term, it might be simplest just to migrate it to OSQA and accept their offer of free hosting. Longer term, if INFORMS does not wish to provide a home (using the OSQA software, or something else open-source), then we can probably find a server someplace else. We're not exactly likely to be hogging anybody's bit pipe with this site. I might even be able to scare up server space here.

One thing I missed in the Stack Exchange post was: once a site is on three-month probation, what does it take to get off?

Also, the reference to April 8 has been replaced with "10 active users per day" and a link to http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5396/can-you-elaborate-the-definition-of-active-site.

On increasing traffic: I don't think of this site as being all that well publicized, except for the link on Mike's blog. If we got more or less regular announcements in sci.op-research, INFORMS newsletters, etc., that would probably help drive some traffic.

If we wanted to move off of here and run some other server someplace, maybe Mike could help, or maybe INFORMS could help. They are trying to push the social networking thing pretty hard these days.

The way I understand that blog post (and I've followed their two founders work for a couple years, so I have an understanding of how they work) is that they started Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange in order to change the way people find answers to difficult questions on the web.

Older-form forums and mailing lists are more suited toward discussions, rather than questions and answers. So Stack Exchange, at its heart, is really meant to make the internet a better place for hosting questions and answers.

When Stack Exchange started, they charged money and let anyone create a site, and that site was basically allowed to operate however the founder wanted. This meant that sites could allow for off-topic discussions, and not questions and answers.

So, they're now trying to get back to their original intentions, which were to create question and answer sites. To do this, they're turning the process for creating a new site into a a vetting process, where you first propose a site, then rally users to populate the site, and create enough critical mass to make the site worth running.

So to be able to continue and existing Stack Exchange site (such as or-exchange) you have to prove to them that people can come to the site and ask a question, and get a good answer in a short amount of time. To ensure this, you need a lot of members of the site who are active users.

So the issue for or-exchange may be that there just isn't enough interest in the site at this point. To fix this, it may be good to make it precisely clear what the intent of the site is about (using that proposal they have on the blog post).

I've known about this site since it came out (I read Michael's blog and twitter) but really never knew if my area of work (simulation and IE software development) really fit with this community.

So I'm not sure of the process, but basically this site needs to draw in more users and activity, or it's going to be shut down. The best way I can think of is for the users of this site who want it to stay open to 1) ask and answer more questions, and 2) advertise the site as much as you can to people you think would be interested.

Hope that helps,

Jon

OR-Exchange could revert to an open source website based on Pligg http://www.pligg.com/

PROS: - Custom so it can be setup similar to OR-Exchange now - Open source so you can take it and use it as long as you source Pligg.com developers

CONS: - Need a server to host it which could cost $ unless we can find a donor - Needs to have an admin to maintain the site - Needs development time

I would not mind to help volunteer develop and maintain it. I unfortunately to not have a server or know who could donate space.

Did you receive some kind of a letter of advice, suspension warning o.e. (with more detailed comments)? I'd be interested to see a copy of the exact wording.

Dear Professor Trick,

I do not believe OR-exchange was a failure. It was a great prototype that helped many and will always be a great example of a successful collaborative platform for OR. I personally received great answers for my questions.

I just wish stackexchange people could take a look at these answers[1,2] so they could see how their platform helped a frustrated graduate student. It could be also a great platform for sharing ideas for professionals and for providing mentorship to students. I don't think it was an overkill either. It was just perfect. And the fact that people started using it with their own identity was exciting.

I suggest we take what we learned from ORE and start a new website with a reddit engine. and this time we can all help. Reddit can be a great model since people can share links and ask questions. and there are millions of reddit clones that we can use. I'd like to offer my help for programming and maintenance. And I am sure companies like IBM, Gurobi, microsoft would love to support it financially. I just have one question can you keep the domain name and the content?

It was a great pleasure watching it grow and it's sad to see it shut down. Thank you for starting it. And I hope to see it live in another form.

Best wishes

Mark

(http://twitter.com/siah) (linux_jvm@yahoo.com)

You could simply do a Google group. It's very similar to sci.op-research but without the spam. The StackExchange framework is useful for high traffic, it's rather overkill otherwise.