A rails / mongodb project also exists for this called http://shapado.com/

Code here: https://github.com/patcito/shapado

Personally I am still uncomfortable with rolling out a site that looks exactly like StackOverflow. I imagine it could be a good basis to start on though.

Maybe not rolling out for public use, but I've found OSQA perfect for internal knowledge bases. Doubles as a quick way to vote for one off things ("I'm doing a talk on HTML5, add and vote-up what you guys want me to talk about").

Liked it...used it...modified it. Wasn't bad. The code was a bit convoluted in places and almost completely undocumented, and they strayed from the typical Django style. All added up, it was negative productivity for this long-term Rails programmer and Django novice. Switched to Shapado (based on Rails) and things are going much better, if for nothing more than Rails' self-documenting conventions. The only drawback is that Shapado is based on mongodb and the (compared to active record) functionally incomplete mongomapper.

I wonder why they don't attempt to differentiate from what they're cloning at all. OSQA's replicated not just functionality but look and feel, ordering and layout of each StackExchange (StackOverflow, ServerFault, et al) feature.

They addressed this in a recent blog post: http://www.osqa.net/2010/04/20/dont-panic-stackexchange-is-n...

The impression I get is they want to create a platform that matches the SE system, and then advance it above and beyond what SE is.

OSQA is the technology behind MetaOptimize Q+A (http://metaoptimize.com/qa), a niche q+a site for machine learning and natural language processing.

I'm a user/dabbler of OSQA, and the project is very nice. However, IMO there are several things holding the project back from greater community involvement:

1) the lack of an official GIT backed repo. 2) the current state of tickets (who's working on what, and how) is very messy. Its managed through Jira, and its just hard to see where things stand.

Besides the fact that it does look like stackexchange, you have to keep in mind that the criteria to start a new stackexchange are quite high in terms of users/questions/traffic. So OSQA can be a good alternative to keep stackexchanges (such as http://semanticoverflow.com which lacks enough users to be restarted as part of stackexchange.com) alive which where created at a time as they were still offering private/seperate installations, due to its import ability.

This or Shapado would certainly making prototyping some new Q&A features easier.

If I don't know ruby or python yet, which one would be easier to tinker with?

Direct link to the main site itself;

http://www.osqa.net/

Potentially useful. How well do this and Shapado scale?

Any good PHP/MYSQL QA systems?