A little background for those who don’t know the origin of Skill Training Complete. There is a website: StackOverflow, which is a question and answer site for programmers. Back around February/March 2010 they announced that they would be providing the software that ran the site as a service for people who wanted to have their own question/answer site. They wouldn’t actually give you the software unless you paid thousands of dollars, but for ~$120 a month they would host the website for you.

It started out as a free beta and I signed up for an account because I thought the software would be great for EVE Online related questions and answers. At this point the person with the account “owned” the data on the website (or they could license it under creative-commons or something similar if they wanted), but they were free to put advertising on their site and make money off it as long as they were willing to pay the hosting fee. I never had any interest in making money off Skill Training Complete. I was willing to cover the expense myself if needed once the service was out of beta, maybe with the help of some donations of the users.

In the middle of April 2010 they (StackOverflow) announced that they were changing the business model. They would no longer be allowing people to run their own websites for profit. But would be creating a process where the internet community could create their own question/answer sites that would be owned by StackOverflow, but all the data would be free under a Creative Commons license.

Existing websites (like Skill Training Complete) have 3 options:

1. Be re-created under the new StackExchange model as a community driven site owned by StackOverflow with all the data (questions/answers) under a Creative Commons license.
2. If the existing site can maintain high enough traffic it can be grandfathered in and left under the old business model of being owned by the creator of the original site with free hosting provided by StackExchange, but no major software upgrades, only bug-fixes.
3. Take a dump of their data and switch to a different StackOverflow clone and provide their own hosting

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What does this mean for Skill Training Complete? In the long term it means that we will need to end up deciding on one of the above 3 options. I’ll give a run-down of how I see each option in relation to STC.

1. There is already a proposal on the new system for an EVE Online site. I would love to see Skill Training Complete graduate to a full StackExchange site run by the community with the support of StackOverflow. The process requires a commitment from the community to get the site created and eventually graduate out of beta to a full blown site. So if for some reason we can’t create the community around this proposal then we would have to go with another option for STC.
2. This option is likely not a good fit for Skill Training Complete because I don’t believe we currently have the traffic to sustain the requirements for free hosting by StackOverflow. If we ever fell below that level of traffic they would shut us down. Also the lack of upgrades to the software is not a good long term limitation. I see this option as only a gateway to option 1 or 3.
3. If option 1 fails to draw the community required to create a full blown StackExchange site for EVE Online questions and answers, or you, the existing STC community, do not want to switch to the new StackExchange platform, I promise that I will move STC to a StackOverflow clone that I can run and host myself.

What can you do to help Skill Training Complete have a bright and active future? Go to the proposal for an EVE Online question/answer site on area51.stackexchange.com. “Follow” the proposal, and help the process by proposing good off-topic and on-topic questions. Spread the word about STC to any EVE forums you frequent, also to your corp or any in-game buddies, we can really use the word of mouth! Also remember you can always follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Feel free to post any comments or suggestions on what we can do to ensure a bright future for Skill Training Complete, either here or on Facebook and Twitter.

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