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community January 14, 2009

Where In The World Do Stack Overflow Users Come From?

Someone asked what the breakdown of Stack Overflow users is by country — on Stack Overflow. I didn’t think it was a particularly appropriate question, because it’s a poll, a meta-question, and not even really a poll about programming per se. Sort of a triple whammy. But I’m happy to answer here on the blog,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background January 11, 2009

Welcome Our Newest Member: Alan Kay

I was amused to see this pop up on the Stack Overflow home page a few days ago: If you don’t know who Alan Kay is, first of all, shame on you — he’s one of the most important figures in modern computing: Kay is one of the fathers of the idea of object-oriented programming,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community January 10, 2009

WMD Editor Reverse Engineered

Remember that WMD reverse engineering project we reluctantly undertook? Check out the current state of the Git repository: This is a major milestone — we’ve essentially de-obfuscated the WMD code, which was my #1 goal! A few thanks are in order: Chris Jester-Young for getting the ball rolling, doing quite a bit of de-obfuscation, and…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community January 6, 2009

Accept Your Own Answers

Have you ever wondered why you can’t accept your own answer on Stack Overflow? If so, you’re not alone. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words; here’s what I just did to one of my own questions: Before: After: Hey, look at that, I just accepted my own answer! Now, there are…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community December 31, 2008

Daily Dose of Daily Reputation Cap

It’s your daily dose of everyone’s best friend, the +200 per day Stack Overflow reputation cap! Did you know that… Without the +200 per day reputation cap, a certain Stack Overflow user would have almost 60,000 reputation? Implementing a logarithmic decline in the value of upvotes would make almost no difference to most people’s reputation scores?…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community December 31, 2008

I Move to Close This Question

As an active Stack Overflow user, one of the abilities you’ll gain at 3,000 reputation is the ability to close and reopen questions. Closed questions don’t allow any new answers to be added, but can still be edited and commented on. All it takes is one user (with the appropriate reputation level, natch) to decide…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community December 27, 2008

New UserVoice Moderators

Over the last few months, I’ve noticed a few users that have been exceptionally active on the Stack Overflow UserVoice feedback site. I have extended UserVoice moderator privileges to Joel Coehoorn (it’s pronounced koo-horn) and Sean Massa. I wasn’t kidding when I said this in the Stack Overflow FAQ: At the high end of this…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community October 25, 2008

Script Responsibly

We’ve noticed there are a number of users running a script that retrieves their uncompressed user page multiple times per second, producing an absurd amount of network traffic. Fortunately, we do cache the user page if the requests come in anonymously, so the database load was not significant. However, this behavior is irresponsible and unacceptable,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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