Proposal: Stack Overflow (in Russian)
The site is now live!
E-mail notifications will be coming shortly, however it's our pleasure to let you know that you can now actively begin participating on the site - no special link is required.
Due to how we needed to set this up, automatic notifications weren't so automatic, but we'll get those out to folks shortly.
Congratulations, now go enjoy the site!
It's been a while, longer than we wanted, but we're practically on the cusp of launching Stack Overflow In Russian as I type this. We've just received the last of the strings back from our translation company, and we're now in the process of getting them imported in order to bring up the new site in private beta.
Heading up this effort is Nicolas Chabanovsky, who some of you might recognize as the founder of one of the strongest sites similar to Stack Overflow - Hashcode.RU. We met Nicolas as we explored the possibility of launching a Russian language version of Stack Overflow, and were quite taken with the work and progress that he and the Hashcode community had achieved. So taken, in fact, that we hired Nicolas as a community manager dedicated to bringing up Stack Oveflow in Russian, and so taken with what the Hashcode community has built that we'll be importing it once we get the new site stood up.
Emails went out today to existing Hashcode users to let them know about the transition, and we'll be making additional announcements both on our blog and Stack Overflow's meta site as things progress - we expect to find a lot of additional interest from Russian-speaking users of Stack Overflow.
In a nutshell, this is what needs to be done before we're ready to launch the private beta:
- Polishing up of strings we received from the translation company (we have odd phrases in many places that need special attention)
- Importing of posts and users from Hashcode, Nicolas is currently working with our developers to make this go as smoothly as possible
- Getting the actual site up and working, then linking it to this proposal
During the private beta, you can help by asking and answering questions just like you would on any other beta, while some of you will likely be asked to help with the translation effort on Transifex.
However, keep in mind, this is a new site, with a new community that will have all new challenges - many of them different from the challenges we faced in the early days of Stack Overflow in English. The best advice that I can give you as you await the launch is solve the problems that you have, don't worry so much about theoretical problems that you don't yet and may not ever have. Make this your site, representative of this community, run the way that best serves you.
We will update again shortly before we're ready to launch. I hope you're all as excited as we are, and we'll see you soon on the private beta!
Update: You can help with the effort to get this launched right now. See here to get involved.
