http://askbot.org is a question and answer oriented forum similar to Stack Overflow or Yahoo Answers. It is written in Python and Django. You can file bug reports via http://bugs.askbot.org/ and the source code is at https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel/. It is developed and maintained by Evgeny Fadeev.
Status
- Rahul Sundaram is leading an effort to package askbot and all its build time and runtime dependencies for Fedora. The goal is to get an instance of it running in say http://ask.fedoraproject.org and serve as a forum for questions and answers. The dependencies are useful for various other projects as well.
- Toshio from Fedora Infrastructure team raised the question of liability and Red Hat Legal has clarified that there isn't any. It is like the users list where end users answer other user's questions and we don't have to moderate the answers. Thanks to Spot for helping with a quick response.
- Rahul Sundaram is in touch with the upstream developer, Evgeny Fadeev (evgeny.fadeev gmail) who is willing to help out with the integration with Fedora Account System. He has made some changes upstream to make it easier to integration with a external authentication system. Refer to http://askbot.org/doc/askbot-as-reusable-django-application.html for more details.
- Prasad.J.Pandit has added support for Fedora Authentication System (FAS) in Askbot. These patches have been sent upstream. Upstream has agreed to make auth support extensible so that we can plugin FAS auth support without having to patch Askbot. Waiting to hear back from upstream on progress. Rahul Sundaram will followup as needed.
- Theming needed. Will request the Fedora design team for help when Askbot and dependencies are in the Fedora repo.
Review requests filed by Rahul Sundaram
django-keyedcache - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=697492
django-robots - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=696516
django-countries - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=696485
django-celery - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=697483
django-kombu - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=696527
python-coffin - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=699335
askbot - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=699336
Other dependencies (pre-existing review requests)
python-celery (dep of django-celery) - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=611277
django-picklefield (dep of python-celery) - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=611068
python-kombu (dep of python-celery) - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=691115
python-html5lib (runtime dep of askbot) - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=252108
Who uses Askbot?
Also WindRiver (Intel) has a internal instance running according to upstream.
What are the alternatives?
- Shapado - Shapado is an open source question-answer system written in Ruby, Mongomapper and MongoDB. http://ask.debian.net is running a instance of this.
- OSQA - OSQA (Open Source Question and Answer) is an open source question-answer system written in Python with Django. Common codebase ancestor with Askbot.
- Stack Overflow - Proprietary. http://askubuntu.com/ is using this.