Yearly Archives: 2010

community October 7, 2010

Membership Has Its Privileges

Our very own Benjamin Dumke opened a meta topic about a year ago that was prescient: Right now, crossing one of the magical rep borders happens more or less unnoticed. People just gain the particular powers. Now, of course they have eagerly been awaiting this moment, and want to start using their new powers instantly.…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community October 5, 2010

Domain Names: The Wrong Question

Friday night we rolled back the domain name of our first out-of-beta website. After less than 24 hours of existing on the internet, nothingtoinstall.com was reverted to its original public beta name — webapps.stackexchange.com. We’re sorry for springing this on you at the last minute but – at least at the time – it felt like circumstances didn’t give us…
Avatar for Robert Cartaino
Director of Community Development (former)
community October 4, 2010

Asking Better Questions

As Stack Overflow has grown, it has started to have some decidedly big city problems. The one we are most concerned about is an influx of very low quality questions. While we still believe in editing and improving low-quality questions to make them better, there’s a fundamental mismatch in scale and effort here — bad…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company October 1, 2010

Our First Area 51 Site Goes Public

Our very first Area 51 site proposal to make it all the way through … Initial Proposal (May 25th) Definition phase (May 25th) Commitment phase (June 14th) Private beta phase (June 30th) Public beta phase (July 7th) … has just arrived — as a real live non-beta public site! webapps.stackexchange.com — Q&A; for power users…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
area51 October 1, 2010

An Area 51 Apology — and Clarification

We’d like to apologize to the Area 51 community. Allow me to explain with a diagram: In this diagram: Charlie Brown is the Area 51 community. Lucy Van Pelt is Stack Overflow Internet Services Inc. The football is the following proposals: Developer Testing, Compiler Design, and Vim. As Joel explained in Merging Season, if ……
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community September 29, 2010

Good Subjective, Bad Subjective

Stack Exchange is about questions with objective, factual answers. We’ve been crystal clear about this for as long as I can remember, even back to the earliest, pre-beta days of Stack Overflow. It’s right there in the standard Stack Exchange FAQ: What kind of questions should I not ask here? Avoid asking questions that are…
Avatar for Robert Cartaino
Director of Community Development (former)
company September 28, 2010

Server Fault: Hiring From The Community Again

In yet another blatant and egregious example of hiring from the community, we’ve just added a Server Fault user to our team — George Beech aka Zypher. Welcome to our two-man sysadmin team of ninjas, George! George will be working out of our NYC world headquarters. Read more about his and Kyle’s continuing plans for…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company September 28, 2010

New Global Inbox

One unwanted side effect of launching so many awesome new Stack Exchange network sites is that the more you participated in, the harder it became to keep track of all your questions, answers, and comments across every site you participated on. That’s kind of a bummer. Well, I’m pleased to announce we’ve added a new…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community September 28, 2010

Factionalism: Site or Tag?

Let’s say I told you we were going to create a programming website that merged all the C#, Java, Ruby, Python, and PHP programmers, so they could all ask their questions together — and simply tag those questions with the appropriate language. You’d probably get a response like this one: I disagree with merging. I…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community September 23, 2010

Flair: Now Even Flairier

When we introduced user flair back in May 2009, we provided two ways to embed flair, either with an iframe, or JavaScript. That may have been fine for a programming website like Stack Overflow, but it wasn’t so hot for … normal people. That is, people who do not live and breathe markup like us…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
area51 September 17, 2010

Merging Season

Area 51 is filling up with thousands of ideas for new Stack Exchange sites, and a pretty clear pattern has started to worry us: too many ridiculously niche proposals, overlapping proposals, and proposals that are already covered by an existing site. Do we really need a site for each individual content management system? The Stack…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
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