Post History

*The following announcement was sent to subscribers of the Codidact announcements mailing list. It has been reformatted here.*

Codidact, the open-source Q&A platform: by the community, for the community.

Hello!  Thank you for following our project to build a place where communities can come together to share knowledge, a
place that puts people first and empowers both learners and teachers.

We're writing today with some updates.  We're making great progress toward our first full version, and we have
communities live right now that are ready for your participation.

## Progress

In January we began work on a new platform, built with C# and ASP .NET and designed to handle large volumes and
large loads from the start.  We feel this is the right place to end up, but the team working on it is small and it's going to
take a while.  We want to do it right, not put pressure on them to rush something out, and so we switched to our backup
plan: we have software written in a different technology stack that's already partway to where we need to be, and it can
handle the loads we're likely to see for the near future.  So in parallel with developing our preferred solution, we're also
improving the other software, written in Ruby, to meet our needs.  We're doing this so we can get to our first full version
more quickly; we haven't abandoned our other approach.

A lot of the work we're doing applies to both code paths.  Everything we're doing with feature design, wireframes, use
cases, graphical design -- that will all transfer smoothly from Ruby to C#.  We're running the Ruby code now and
improving it as we go, and at some point in the future our plan is to switch the Ruby implementation for the C#
implementation without changing what users see.

## New communities

We have communities running on our software right now, and we're ready to welcome more -- more on that in a bit.  First, let me tell you about our existing communities.  If you're curious, visit any of them and browse the many questions
and answers there.  If you want to post (and we hope you will), click "sign up" -- once you create an account you can
use it to sign in to any of our sites.

Our first community is **Writing**, a site for the craft of professional writing, editing, and publishing.  Questions about all
types of writing are welcome -- fiction, technical documentation, scholarly articles, poetry, scriptwriting, blogs, and more.  Bring your questions about style, plotting, organization, working with publishers, self-publishing, formatting, getting
useful feedback, and more.  And keep your eye out for our occasional writing challenges, where somebody proposes a
prompt or a theme and we write scenes, short-short stories, or even poetry in response.  Visit the community at
[https://writing.codidact.com](https://writing.codidact.com).

We welcomed our newest community last week.  **Outdoors** is a site for anyone who wants to get away from home and
experience the great outdoors -- hiking, caving, kayaking, camping, off-road driving, hang-gliding, and much more!  While it might seem ironic to launch an outdoors site when much of the world is staying at home due to the pandemic,
we think it's a great time to plan, learn, and maybe even fantasize about things we can't do right now.  And also a great
time for pictures; there's a photo contest happening right now.  Visit the community at [https://outdoors.codidact.com](https://outdoors.codidact.com).

Do you have a community looking for a place to ask and answer questions and share knowledge?  If you've got a group
of interested people, we'd like to work with you to build a community on Codidact.  You can post a request in our "site
suggestions" area at [https://meta.codidact.com/categories/10](https://meta.codidact.com/categories/10).

Thank you again for your interest in Codidact!

The Codidact Team  
https://codidact.org