Hi
I'm wondering building a website like StackOverFlow (approximately the same features using ASP.NET ) How much Work-power and time does it take in your opinion .
My boss has asked me to estimate for work-power , time , cost and suitable technologies .
I appreciate any direction .
People come to this site and think wow stackoverflow this is an easy site to create. I mean all it is is post a question then people submit an answer. I think that is a big misconception. Maybe just maybe the database is quite simple, a question has multiple answers and an answer has multiple comments associate with it. If you dig deep into it the questions and answers could actually be stored in the same table...with some indicator as to whether it is a question or an answer. But to answer your question, I don't think it is as simple as one might think. It's definitely not difficult in the logical sense (it's doable). What I am saying is it is more then a one week job :).
it is not that hard to do the site. the design is nice but simple. the engine isint THAT complicated (or so it looks). biggest problem is the load that falls on this site and the hard task of moderating/maintaining it. and the best part of it is the idea ;)
Buddy, there is a website similar to this called http://startups.com
You can probably ask this question there. Its specifically designed to answer questions like this. Whereas stackoverflow is intended for programmers and programming related questions. I see this question being asked here a bit isolated.
I believe that the site would take plenty of time to implement. If I'd have to pull a guess of thin air I'd say somewhere between 800-1200 man hours.
Then comes the setting up servers, ensuring scalability, testing, fine-tuning algorithms.
So depending on how good you or your team is it could take anywhere up to a year to write something like this.
Disclaimer: I am just talking based on 10 years of experience with web-development. But I could be COMPLETELY wrong.
I think that the diffuclt of stackoverflow is to get community (very good quality community, not like yahoo answers).
Not only that, also use cases from stack overflow are pretty cool and adapt very well to get a good community.
About work-power a good skilled programmer could start it, if at full time like a month or less could do it. BUT! the programmer should have the idea,not a freelance or something like that, freelance or slave monkey coder could take a more time to do it. But there are more problems, like money to invest at very begin of the app for example in hosting / server power costs.
Also stack overflow, could be compared to forums...its like a forum evoled or something similar.
Someone said that requires a lot of work power, I disagree if you start something to get the best scability,etcs (like project of big scale) you are going to death of that project. Start something simple, very simple when there are scability problems start with that but no at begin!
Probably longer than you expect: