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community March 25, 2009

Responsible Advertising: Feed a Programmer

We’re now experimenting with serving up a small AdSense banner for users with less than 200 reputation. This banner appears just under the title of any question. Up to 90 percent of our traffic is from Google now. We feel that users arriving from Google search will be accustomed to seeing a small ad banner…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community March 21, 2009

More Voting Anomalies

In December we began tracking and removing anomalous voting patterns. This happens automatically as part of a daily script, and it’s worked well to date, nullifying the most egregious upvoting and downvoting anomalies. I’ve been getting a few reports of further voting issues via the email link provided at the bottom of every Stack Overflow…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community March 20, 2009

Nominate a New Stack Overflow Moderator

Stack Overflow has exactly four moderators: Joel, Jeff (me), Jarrod, and Geoff. It’s no coincidence that the list of moderators is identical to the list of co-founders and mainline developers. As we launch the upcoming IT / SysAdmin sister site, we’ve had very little luck locating notable folks from that community to act as moderators…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community March 16, 2009

IT Stack Overflow Update: Naming is Hard

A quick update on the IT / SysAdmin themed Stack Overflow. 1) The launch will realistically have to be late April, as March has been pretty busy for a variety of reasons. 2) The pursuit of a Joel Spolsky or Jeff Atwood equivalent figure to be the spiritual godfather of the site has been ..…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community March 13, 2009

Jeff and Joel at MIX 09: Live Podcast

Joel and I will be at the upcoming MIX 09 conference in Las Vegas next week. More specifically, we’ll be doing the Stack Overflow podcast live from the show! Tuesday, March 17, 2009, at 6:30 PM At the Third Place hang out area The Venetian Las Vegas 4th Floor, Marcelo 4403 You will need to…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community March 9, 2009

The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong

Paul Graham’s Hacker News is a great website to find interesting programming links and sane discussion. The site reflects a sort of post-Reddit sensibility; the design of HN was directly intended to address the shortcomings of programming.reddit.com from someone very much on the inside (Reddit was a Paul Graham Y Combinator startup). As such we…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community March 6, 2009

New 10k Rep Tools Now Available

Those 10,000 reputation tools I promised, lo those many moons ago? They are now live. If you have the requisite reputation, you’ll see a link at the top of every page which leads to the tools area: Congratulations on achieving 10,000 reputation! You’ve earned the right to see (and undelete) deleted posts, and vote to…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community March 4, 2009

The Great Edit Wars

Alas, Stack Overflow has fallen prey to that dread disease that plagues all wiki systems: The Edit War. We’re not exactly like Wikipedia, because we are a hybrid system, but it’s worth scanning the official Wikipedia definition: Edit warring is the confrontational use of edits to win a content dispute. Administrators often must make a…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community February 27, 2009

Happy 100,000th Question!

I’ve been remiss in not celebrating an important Stack Overflow milestone. Sometime on Wednesday, February 25th, a user asked.. Our 100,000th Question! I didn’t say it was a good question, mind you. But it was the hundred thousandth question posted to Stack Overflow. So, for reference — and remember our private beta started on 7/31/2008,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community February 21, 2009

New Question / Answer Rate Limits

Stack Overflow is somewhat unique in that we encourage participation of essentially anonymous, random programmers. Our idea is to radically reduce the bar for participation, and take one giant leap of faith: Trusting our users. Well, most of them, anyway. We have the typical hurdles in place to prevent bots from gaming our system: JavaScript…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community February 16, 2009

When Is An Account “Abandoned”?

Let’s talk about deletion. Not question deletion, which works this way, for the record. The deletion I want to talk about today is account deletion. Stack Overflow is a bit unusual in that our accounts are ultra lightweight. We don’t require registration; we allow essentially anonymous posting. We were inspired by Wikipedia in this regard.…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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