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Hi,

I'm considering the possibility of using Askbot for the community support forums of an open-source project. The idea is to use self-hosted, assuming it can be used that way for free.

I'd like to ask for some opinions as to a specific issue we have. There is a book with lots of valuable technical content for our project. This book was on sale but now there's a possibility that the author will agree to releasing it online for free.

The book is very well organized and broken up into sections that I think we could paste it in bits on a Q&A site as questions and their answers. Then it would naturally evolve with new answers from other users, edits, etc.

My questions:

1. when I was thinking of doing this on StackExchange, I feared that the rules there wouldn't let me for some reason, they are very legalistic. I wouldn't be bound by any such rules on Askbot, would I? I could host my community and make my own rules, right?

2. what if, instead of breaking it questions and answers, I wanted a more differentiated area of my Q&A site to hold the book in its current, structured form? I mean, keeping the same look and feel of the site, add something like "Reference Manual" to the menus and just show the table of contents, linking to a bunch of long pages, each with a full chapter. We would then be able to cross-link between the manual and the Q&A area, but they would be two separate organizations of information. I suppose this feature doesn't exist, and I would have to change the code in Askbot, but this could be done with some ease, right?

At this point I'm not asking for technical details, I just need to validate my strategy and the options available to me. Thanks in advance for any advice.