Josh Heyer

community March 8, 2013

VOTE NOW in the 2013 Stack Overflow Moderator Election

It’s time once again to cast your vote for the next Stack Overflow moderators. The primaries have just ended, and the top ten candidates can be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/election. Why more moderators? We’re running the election now (rather than a year from the last election in June) because veteran moderator Tim Post is stepping down…
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Community Manager (former)
company October 26, 2012

Take the Super User Windows 8 Challenge

Well, Windows 8 is finally available in the wild. Of course, developers have had access to it for quite a while – our ongoing Apptivate contest would be looking pretty sad otherwise. But now you can actually _buy _the upgrade for your home PC if you’re so inclined, or for your mom’s PC if you…
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Community Manager (former)
community August 8, 2012

Stack Exchange is not a forum: the role of “niceness” on a Q&A site

It’s been a few weeks now since Joel kicked off our “summer of love”. There’ve been some excellent discussions in the blog comments and on Meta, and we’ve tried to present some hard data on how objectively “nice” we are. But it’s high time to talk about what place “niceness” really has on Stack Exchange.…
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Community Manager (former)
colored tile pattern with comment box
background August 2, 2012

Stack Exchange: now 60 Valued Associates strong!

Holy smokes… It’s been over three and a half years since Jeff recruited Valued Associate #00002 to work full-time on building Stack Overflow. In that time, a lot has changed. Jeff’s moved on to teasing us with his next project, Jarrod’s gone from spending his days knee-deep in code to managing the Core dev team…
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Community Manager (former)
community June 8, 2012

Election participation badges

The 2012 Stack Overflow moderator election is off to a good start, with 15 candidates and just under three days left for nominations. Elections are a fairly mature feature of Stack Exchange at this point (Role-playing Games has one in progress now as well), but Stack Overflow remains the largest and I dare say most…
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Community Manager (former)
community June 4, 2012

2012 Stack Overflow Community Moderator Election Begins

Hard to believe it’s been only six months since the last moderator election on Stack Overflow… Remember A Theory of Moderation? It talks about how moderators are the “human exception handlers” on Stack Overflow, elected to deal with those rare situations the normal community moderation can’t handle. It also notes: The most common moderator task…
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Community Manager (former)
2017inReview
area51 April 25, 2012

When a Site Grows Quiet

In the lifecycle of a Stack Exchange site, we’ve long held the philosophy that “it takes as long as it takes” to build a sustainable community: How long can a site stay in beta? The simple answer is, it takes as long as it takes. We’ll wait. If a site needs more activity, go out…
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Community Manager (former)
background March 22, 2012

Respect the community – your own, and others’

In “Why Can’t You Have Just One Site?” Jeff wrote about the rationale for creating three sites instead of one, and the process for determining where a question belongs: Is it really so hard to figure out which community you belong to, and thus, where your question belongs? Ask yourself this: what is your job…
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Community Manager (former)
background March 6, 2012

Reputation and Historical Archives

If you’ve been around Meta Stack Overflow the past few days, you’ve seen a fair bit of conversation sparked by the recent changes to how reputation is calculated: To be clear: reputation values are not changing, every action in the system is still worth the same amount. Here’s what will be different: Your reputation will be correct at…
Avatar for Josh Heyer
Community Manager (former)