Branded Stack Overflow Sites [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicates:
Introduce sub-communities (or “Portals”) to prevent fragmentation
Is the Stack Exchange engine available?

I've been through all the FAQs and whatnot, and can't seem to answer this question, so hopefully someone here can help. :)

I want to create a branded Stack Overflow experience for our development platform. Essentially, what I'd like is a site that is powered by Stack Overflow and has all the Stack Overflow functionality, but is restricted to certain tags that pertain to our technology. It would then have a logo some place of our company as well. So it could be "x's Stack Overflow" or whatever.

The intention here is this: we have forums for our platform, but really, we believe in Stack Overflow and would instead like to direct users to it, but have our tags automatically show up, and the home page would be filtered to our tags, etc.

Is that possible? Does Stack Overflow have anything like that?

Answer 1

A branded Stack Overflow is not possible at the moment as waiwai933 outlines in his answer.

However, something more appropriate for your needs and what's being currently done, is branded tags. For e.g., android, google-chrome, flex are all sponsored by their respective companies and carry their logo in the tag homepage and in all the tags. For e.g., here's how the android tag's home page looks like:

You can have your own logo everywhere you see the little green droid.

Just set your homepage to stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/your-company-name and you'll get a filtered list of questions with your tag.

Answer 2

I'm not quite sure what you want exactly:

• If you want a custom view of Stack Overflow restricted to viewing certain tags, this is not available.

• If you want a custom Stack Exchange site for public use, this is not for sale. However, you can propose such a site on Area 51, and if it gains enough public traction, it will launch. Do note that this is very difficult.

• If you want a custom internal Stack Exchange site on an intranet, this is available, but you better be a big company on the scale of, as has been historically said, banks. Contact [email protected] for further details.

Answer 3

I think you can get close enough to what you want that it might be worth doing:

• Use the Stack Exchange API to pull the appropriate questions and display them on your custom site, with your custom logo, etc. Make sure you follow all the various API rules such as proper linking and attribution.
• Replace the answer submission box with a link to the question on stackoverflow so they can submit answers using Stack Overflow's interface.
• The link for "ask a question" references Stack Overflow's ask a question page so they enter new questions via stack overflow's interface.

The reason you have to do the question and answer submission using SO's interface is that the API does not yet allow posting, voting, editing, and several other functions.

Which does, in fact, limit the utility of having a custom site. However it may be enough since a lot of your users will merely be looking for answers to solved problems.

Alternately, create a site for yourself using a stack overflow clone, and use the data dump to import relevant questions every other month. Unfortunately it would be a one way import (posts to your site wouldn't enter the stackoverflow corpus).

While posting and editing via the API is slated for the future, it has no timeframe. I wouldn't hold my breath for it, either, as they've recently spent some time making the mobile theme more usable, so one of the major reasons for an API that allowed posting, voting, editing, etc is largely gone.