Stripe: Introducing Answers | Hacker News Reader

Stripe: Introducing Answers

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59 pointshawke19 comments

I've been using Stripe for a while and have always wanted something like this. Search results for solutions to Stripe specific problems are horrendous to navigate or nonexistent.

It would be cool to open-source it.

Totally, a simple answers site like this is seriously in need. I wouldn't even mind paying $9/month for something simple and elegant and easy to brand like this.

What about AskBot ?

http://askbot.com/

It has problems in the design department. It appears extremely busy, because your eye is drawn to the top and right hand side of the page, which is completely devoid of any content.

It's not helped by all the social media widgets and RSS links and Large Box Of Male Faces. And flags.

They really need to dump all the irrelevant junk and focus on the content.

There are a couple of help desk tools which can compile a Q&A style knowledge base out of customer support emails. Here's one I'm familiar with: http://www.desk.com/product#sec6

Checkout http://ribbot.com

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-...

We're actually using OSQA on the backend which, as you might guess, is open-source.

http://osqa.net

That's some mighty fine skinning work you guys did there!

I recently created http://ribbot.com for this exact purpose.

And it's open source: https://github.com/barmstrong/ribbot

It's great to see companies adopting this model for support (validates my theory) and it looks like Stripe has stepped it up a notch design/feature wise which I think can inspire ribbot. Ribbot.com (hosted version) also supports custom domains etc.

Love the minimalist interface. Perhaps a little more differentiation between comments (becomes a bit hard to read when the comments are nested). We'll definitely use this.

Cool! Super small nitpick: There's a space missing in the alert that shows when you upvote/downvote without being logged in:

> Sorry, but anonymous users cannot vote.Please login or create an account here.

Fixed! Thanks for pointing this out.

What did you guys use for clustering similar questions?

Cool ethos, but I question how well the 'no ticketing system' goal will scale..

To be clear, we're only against ticketing systems that worsen the experience for the user. Ticketing systems on the backend are great, but having an automated mail system spew at you is a less-than-ideal experience. Email from real humans is what I want as a user of a support system.

I would love to know what you think of our approach to customer support at http://supportbee.com. We have focused on simplicity and making sure that to a customer everything looks just like regular email.

Awesome work brian and team stripe, it looks great.

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