Welcome to the new monthly blog series (this is our first one!!) designed to keep you in the loop on the latest launches and features on stackoverflow.com. Catch up on what’s new, what’s launching, and what’s happening behind the scenes all in one place.
Here’s what’s new from the past month:
Expanded voting access to all users
Voting is an integral part of the Stack Overflow experience, as it helps indicate questions and answers that the community values. However, historically, we have gated voting based on reputation points—15 for upvotes and 125 for downvotes. We introduced “free votes” to help new users engage in curation early and we believe this is one of the most effective ways to encourage new users to come back.
Free votes are a new kind of vote, originally introduced as part of an experiment, to help educate users on how to use votes on the platform, before they have earned enough reputation to vote normally. Learn more about this voting update.
Open-ended questions on Stack Overflow
We’ve heard feedback that some of the most valuable discussions involve developer preferences, personal experiences, and topics with more than one "right" answer. Historically, the platform has closed these questions for being subjective or not having a single accepted solution.
We’re exploring how Stack Overflow can host these valuable, inclusive questions and answers on the platform while still maintaining our standards for quality.
Sign up to get early access and provide your feedback to these types of open-ended questions.
Early look into the Stack Overflow redesign
We shared on Meta Stack Exchange a look behind the scenes on what’s happening with the upcoming Stack Overflow redesign. These series of posts included:
- Part 1: Introduction and background
- Part 2: Color and Typography
- Part 3: Navigation and Homepage
- Part 4: Questions
- Part 5: User Profiles
Check out the first look at the design changes we’re considering, learn about the key areas we’re focusing on, and provide your feedback and suggestions on the posts above.
New anti-spam tool on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sites
We launched a new tool (designed to complement existing anti-spam tooling) to enhance the network's defense against spam and increase the total amount of spam caught by automation. These tools support and enhance existing community work, such as anti-spam projects like those created by the Charcoal team. By automatically and immediately catching a significant portion of repetitive spam, we can free up time for moderators and other community members. Learn more about the new anti-spam tool here.
Coding challenges: New collaboration with Kaggle
Challenges have been around for a few months and have gotten some great response, but now we’re going bigger. Stack Overflow teamed up with Kaggle to create a special two-part challenge.
Kaggle is a platform for machine learning and data science folks to explore data and complete challenges. Their October Playground challenge was about predicting roadway accidents based on data about road design, weather conditions, signage etc.
As part of the challenge, participants were tasked with building a web application to explore the data. The challenge just closed, and we’re excited to see the results!
New onboarding emails
We launched a new email series to educate new users about Stack Overflow and its features, how to be involved, and how to contribute after signing up for an account. The email series highlights features, privileges, and actions available to new users.
We want to do everything we can to set up new users for success, whether they are here to get help with a coding problem, to connect with the community, or to learn about a new technical topic. It's often intimidating or frustrating to understand how to contribute to Stack Overflow without any knowledge of what reputation is or the guidelines that often discourage participation. Getting started with Stack Overflow hasn’t always been a great user experience. Creating a more robust onboarding experience will hopefully ease that pain point and encourage continued engagement from new users.