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I’ve been in love with StackOverflow since the day Jeff and Joel announced it. I taught myself how to write SmugMug using Google, not books, so a site like StackOverflow was a dream come true. However, I’d only been a lurker until recently – I figured I didn’t have the kind of time needed to really answer questions.

When ServerFault, and recently, the Photography & Photographic Editing StackExchange site came along, I started lurking more. Now that I run a photography company, I don’t get to take as many photos (go figure), but our employees and customers, obviously, take tons. And just like StackOverflow, the Photo site is full of great information shared by a wonderful, and growing, community. One of the things I really love about these sites is the overflow nature – many photographers are into geekier pastimes and vice versa, so there’s a natural compatibility with Photos and StackOverflow, for example.

Very recently, a few people have both asked “Why doesn’t SmugMug have a StackExchange site? Do you want to control all the data or something?” and “Why does your support forum suck so badly for finding answers to fairly simple questions?”. Our support forum does suck for this (good answers get buried pages deep, searching is tough, you don’t want to read all the discussions all the time, the same question get asked many times, etc…) Which, of course, got me thinking – surely we can just pay StackExchange to solve this problem (I do not want to control all the data – I just want an awesome experience).

StackExchange would be amazing for our community because:

- The best answers to a question are always on top. No wading through pages of replies.
- Searching is easy, both on StackExchange and via engines like Google.
- The same questions won’t get asked over and over – they’ve already been answered and are easy to find.
- The system encourages people to ask great questions and provide authoritative answers.
- You can tell at a glance if someone answering your question knows what they’re talking about.
- They’ve done this for large topics like StackOverflow already, so they understand the ins & outs of the process and software to support communities like this.
- And more… See for yourself at StackOverflow