Featured: ZergOverflow.com

The Starcraft universe is, just like the ordinary one, expanding continously. After eleven years the vast community around this game is not only alive and kicking, but spawning new sites still. This week, Polygon reVue presents a new and quite different resource - ZergOverflow.com. There are many questions to ask for a person who wants to learn more about Starcraft and its dynamic scene, and this site aims to answer them all.

From the head admin himself, here’s what ZergOverflow.com is all about:

PR.com: How would you describe ZergOverFlow.com, and what is the purpose behind it?

ZergOverflow: ZergOverflow.com is a question and answering platform helping users getting answers for questions in a specified scene, in our case: Starcraft!

PR.com: The name of the site might imply that questions are restricted to topics dealing with the Zerg race, is that the case? Does it focus primarily on Starcraft: Brood War or Starcraft 2?

ZergOverflow: I have a tendency of ridiculous naming on things include websites I could easily call it ask-starcraft.com and save myself from explaining why zerg overflows…. but no, the name of the site does not imply that it only covers zerg related questions: ZergOverflow.com essentially allows users to ask ANYTHING that is related or indirectly related to Starcraft.

PR.com: How did the name came about?

ZergOverflow: Inspired by StackOverflow.com (the original StackExchange website) and my support of zerg race and JulyZerg, a favorite zerg player in Korean ProLeague scene. The name ‘zerg overflowed’ came about when I saw JulyZerg’s 2008 OSL Final versus Best [spoiler] where he pulled a a drones drill breaks through Best’s wall off, which was stunning to watch [/spoiler]. Of course, the name wasn’t referring to anything until I developed this website in the end of 2009.

PR.com: Your site has taken its Questions & Answers-algorithm from StackExchange.com, which is dedicated to questions around programming. In layman’s terms, what is it that it does so well?

ZergOverflow: The existing web that we know today provides enormous amount of knowledge and social capacity. However when it comes to answering a question, you are always on the seek searching for answers and the correct ones amongst them. Q&A Platform is explicitly designed to answer what an user is asking, minimise research needs and unnecessary comments (although sometime it helps to further explain the answer). It does exactly what user is here for: answer questions.

PR.com: The database of straight forward facts, questions and answers are growing every day and it is clear that many people have a lot that they to learn when it comes to Starcraft. What are your longterm plans for ZergOverflow.com, and what’s the next immediate step.

ZergOverflow.com will be trying hard performing what it does the best and that is answering questions. The buzz word ‘usability’ is an ingredient of ZergOverflow’s success as we now begin to think that it is an art to prompt someone to ask. That’s why we will be focusing hard on making ZergOverflow “easy to ask question” and “easy to find answers”

PR.com: There is already a very comprehensive and rich database for Starcraft knowledge, the Liquipedia. ZergOverflow.com works very differently from that site, but what are the main features that make it complimentary to the established type of fact resource?

ZergOverflow: The fact that ZergOverflow.com isn’t a discussion forum (nor are we keen to move towards that directly), we remain a specialist in Q&A, this means ZergOverflow easily compliments with knowledge base like Wikia, Liquipedia or news forums like GosuGamer, Starfeeder. There are some technical aspects (which I won’t go into details ) that will make Q&A information on ZergOverflow database integrable towards affiliate sites and utilise these data as their FAQ or Help search, making these sections of their websites dynamic and self-update.