Q&A website

A Q&A website is a type of humorous website where the site creators use the images of pop culture icons to answer input from the site's visitors, usually in question/answer format. The original progenitor of this type of site was the now-defunct Forum 2000. The Forum 2000 claimed to have run the site by means of artificial intelligence, and the personalities on the website were called SOMADs, or "State of Mind Adjointness pairs". The Conversatron, which began to take questions December 12, 1999 was first to break the Forum 2000's format. The Conversatron made it clear that the site was not run by artificial intelligence, and called the site's personalities "Askees", in contrast to the visitors, called "Askers". The Conversatron stated in a thread that it will be "going down for permanent maintenance" [1] (http://conversatron.com/convers.py?topic=105691&count=12) at some time in early 2005, but it may be supplanted by something "different, but still the same."

Jason Nelson, creator of The Conversawang released its PHP-based software used to run the site. The software, dubbed Wangcode, became open source under the GNU General Public License. Previously, the impediment to creating a Q&A website was that each site had its own unique, proprietary software. Once the code became available, numerous Q&A sites sprouted up, many of them outliving the Conversawang (which itself has recently seen a rebirth.) An example of a Wangcode-based site is Deuce Tre - Conspiratron.

The Hateatron (http://hateatron.com/) went online January 15th, 2002 at a time when many other Q&A sites where springing up. The Hateatron runs on software written by its creator Safiire Arrowny, and has gone through many different incarnations since its beginning. The Hateatron's defining factor is that aside from just answering questions with its Haters, it has a fully integrated forum called the User Owned or UO Forum. The idea of this type of forum evolved completely by fluke, and turned into an extention of the Q&A format. The Characters from the front page now sprang to life inside the forum with all its other users, who had taken up permanent residence on the site. The Hateatron now sports a community and readership of over 100 regular users, a yearly convention called Hateakon, and have answered nearly 5000 questions.

Other Q&A sites have started out using the Wangcode but they ended up rewriting the entire back-end at one point or another. Jerk Squad launched an improved back-end in August 2004, though the code is not publically available. The new back-end used for Ask Dr. Science, codenamed Beakertron (http://askdrscience.org/beakertron.php), will be released under the GNU General Public License by its author, David Perry (http://labgoats.com/ads/search.php?askee=Boolean).

Contents

1 External links 1.1 Examples of Q&A sites 1.2 Defunct Q&A sites 1.3 Other Q&A links

External links

Examples of Q&A sites

1. The Conversatron (http://www.conversatron.com)
2. Conversawang (http://www.conversawang.com) is modeled after the Conversatron, and features its own unique software called Wangcode, released as open source free software.
3. Deuce Tre - Conspiratron (http://deucetre.net/conspiratron/)
4. Jerk Squad! (http://www.jerksquad.com)
5. Master Ninja (http://www.masterninja.com)
6. Ask Dr. Science (http://askdrscience.org/)
7. The Hateatron (http://hateatron.com/)
8. Moral Minority (http://www.moralminority.org/forum.phtml)
9. Subnova Mindfire (http://www.subnova.com/mindfire/)
10. The Internet Oracle (http://cgi.cs.indiana.edu/~oracle/index.cgi)
11. Askatron.com (http://www.askatron.com) was created in response to news that The Conversatron will be going down for "permanent maintenance."

Defunct Q&A sites

1. True Meaning Of Life ( http://www.truemeaningoflife.com ) became nearly as well-known as The Conversatron at its peak. The site's theme blended Buddhist philosophy with video games, although TMOL frequently gave relationship advice to its Askers, known as "Unenlightened Souls". The True Meaning of Life no longer operates as a Q&A site, but they still host their archives (http://www.truemeaningoflife.com/archive.html).
2. World Wide Worb (http://foxglove.dyndns.org/worb/) shut down after its internet service provider changed its policies. The page one is redirected to states that, in order to get around this policy change, the operating costs would increase by 300%.

Other Q&A links

1. How Forum 2000 works (http://andrej.com/quadratic.html)