StackOverflow Is Down

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by blacklight on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @10:27AM (#32332159)

And this is at least the 4th or 5th time within 10 days that either the website is down or performance is badly degraded.

So bad for a website that is basically the go-to resource where IT professionals get their answers.

So bad that the whole platform is closed-source, so we can't even spin multiple instances.

The main resource used by developers and sysadmins around the world is locked and centralized, and when that central place goes down all the answers go down with it.

We need crawlers and scrapers to download EVERYTHING out of the SE platforms, and they need to do so on a daily basis. All content on SE must be mirrored across the world, and if they don't want to do it then we'll do the scraping for them.

And, most of all, we need alternatives that are open and decentralized, and we need them right now.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by zufallsheld on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @10:40AM (#32332384)

Stackoverflow's data is cc-by-sa 4.0 licensed and can be found here: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

So nothing is stopping anyone to spin-up multiple instances.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by Wowfunhappy on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @11:19AM (#32332933)

StackExchange is by no means perfect, but the copyleft content license is a key reason I feel comfortable contributing to the platform. (Which I assume is why they do it.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by mark-r on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @11:16AM (#32332893)

It's much harder to work with the data if you don't have the code. SO is not open source.

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Re:StackOverflow Is Down by distantsounds on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @11:20AM (#32332936)

https://www.rickcarlino.com/2020/keeping-an-offline-copy-of-...

not so sure about that

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by noSyncCloud on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @01:36PM (#32334670)

Here's a working link to Kiwix since the link on the page 404s: https://www.kiwix.org/en/download/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by mark-r on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @11:56AM (#32333418)

That's kind of cool, thanks. How long does it take to do a web scrape versus a DB dump?

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Re:StackOverflow Is Down by MonkeyMalarky on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @11:20AM (#32332937)

IMO it would be more interesting to not use their code and build some kind of specialized search service. One that learns to rank results from user metrics and feedback?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by he_is_legend on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @02:26PM (#32335206)

so like personalised google search, with the terrible results that that inevitably produces for code related content?

i am confused though. how do you think SO currently works? Both questions and answers are already ranked via user metrics (individual upvotes and historical upvotes) and feedback (comments)?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by someguy5344523 on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @10:48AM (#32332501)

> We need crawlers and scrapers to download EVERYTHING out of the SE platforms, and they need to do so on a daily basis. All content on SE must be mirrored across the world, and if they don't want to do it then we'll do the scraping for them.

I think that's already the case. Whenever I look up a technical issue, the first result is usually from SO; the next results are usually from websites that copied that first SO page

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by rr888 on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @11:37AM (#32333168)

You're lucky, for me recently its the other way around, spam copies first.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by amanj41 on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @10:32AM (#32332248)

If you use brave browser it usually is able to point you to corresponding web archive pages when SO is down. Nice to have it directly integrated into the browser

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by knowhy on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @10:39AM (#32332370)

I think stack exchange provides data dumps via archive.org

https://archive.org/download/stackexchange

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by hddherman on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @11:04AM (#32332735)

A read-only, self-hostable copy of StackOverflow (and its sister sites) is already doable with Kiwix + the content packages they publish.

Content packages: https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages

Example of how a site looks like (in this case SuperUser), hosted on my server: https://kiwix.ounapuu.ee/superuser.com_en_all_2021-04/A/inde...

And hosting it really isn't all that difficult: https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2021/12/09/self-hosting-wikipedia/

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Re:StackOverflow Is Down by Pengtuzi on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @10:40AM (#32332377)

> we'll do the scraping for them

Awesome! Let us know when we can start using your new open source service, it must be mirrored and need it right now.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by pugworthy on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @11:41AM (#32333228)

I’m not trying to be funny but it’s interesting how much panic one can read in the parent comment.

We all joke about the dependency on SO. It seems to actually be more true than perhaps we’d like to admit.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by 300bps on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @11:53AM (#32333378)

It’s unjustified panic. It’s freely downloadable and available everywhere.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StackOverflow Is Down by NateEag on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @10:52AM (#32332572)

FWIW, the Codidact project has been plugging away at building an OSS replacement for SE:

https://www.codidact.org/

[ Parent | on HN ]