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by johansch 3152 days ago
I remember reaching out to them a bunch of years ago (2012 or so) in order to ask them to host a stack overflow sub-site for our product (from a sizeable company). We were willing to pay quite a lot (because they had the premier UX for this kind of thing), but they weren't at all interested. They just told us to try to grow things "organically", because they had decided to focus 100% on open stuff.

We weren't really interested in their google juice, all we wanted was their actual functionality. Some non-stackoverflow domain would have been fine.

It just seemed like a missed opportunity on their end. I don't think we were the only company asking for this kind of service...

5 comments

If I understand correctly, they offer this now, your private instance for your own product(s) & team(s):

https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise

Edit: while interesting, this (private internal instance for your team) is not what johansch is after (separate public instance dedicated to your product, for your users)

I looked into using their Enterprise product for my employer about 6 months ago. It seemed to be a nice product but was shockingly expensive compared to its counterparts in the space. Also, when they say "enterprise" they meant it. They are targeting large companies with 10s of thousands of employees; our 300 user company was really on the low side. Of course this is a pretty new product and this type of thing tells me that it's not quite mature yet and probably difficult to support.
this is very intriguing. Right now we use Confluence for something in this direction. I'd much rather us have a private stack overflow page for a subset of what we do on Confluence.
(Edit) This appears to be for non-public stuff only, though. So an internal stackoverflow.

Still no solution for a company wanting to host a public stackoverflow instance for some product.

Ah, yes, right, sorry. I understand now what you were after. Agree there would have been (is?) an interesting potential there too.
Considering there are companies that are completely based around selling private StackOverflow clones, I agree.
Maybe the Channels are what's you're after? Granted it's not out yet, but it seems a good fit for your use case.

https://stackoverflow.com/channels

I'm doing project in a similar vein right now, but in a totally different space. We call it the "Spotify model" where you host your stuff intermixed with ours, with the option to query just ours or just yours.

Good times - having to write a huge authentication / middleware layer to make sure everything is correct.

see Get Satisfaction, actually a little older than stackoverflow
Get Satifaction is far simpler in features than SO. I don't think you can compare the two at all. SO is a full proper Q&A site.

I've never personally seen a thriving Get Satisfaction instance. So maybe I'm being a little too hard on them. But I must've come across a hundred of them. I don't believe it's a well designed product.