Design

community November 9, 2010

Stack Overflow Homepage Changes

As I mentioned in The Horror of No Answer: Revival and Necromancer: It’s fine — expected, even — for there to be a “long tail” of questions that are too obscure, too narrow, or just plain unanswerable for whatever reason. Sometimes you have to be patient; it takes the time it takes. But seeing the…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community November 3, 2010

The Horror of No Answer: Revival and Necromancer

On the Stack Exchange network, we define an “unanswered question” as a question with no upvoted answers. This is a very, very strict definition. The way we define it, your question could still technically be unanswered even if it has multiple answers — so long as none of those answers have received their first upvote.…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community October 27, 2010

Code Camp Video Interview

A few weeks ago, I presented HTML 5 Local Storage — as featured in our global network auto-login — at the 2010 Silicon Valley Code Camp. After the talk, Mehul Harry of DevExpress buttonholed me to talk about HTML 5 local storage … and everything else we’ve been working on over the last 6 months.…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community October 19, 2010

Vote Early, Vote Often

Have you ever wondered why the vote buttons and score are so prominent on every Stack Exchange question? Putting voting front and center is very much intentional; it is how … good content is voted to the top wrong or incorrect content is voted to the bottom users who consistently provide useful content accrue reputation…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community October 15, 2010

Stack Overflow Chat Now Live

It seems like only five short months ago we were discussing the value of having a hypothetical “Third Place” for our network: The third place is a term used in the concept of community building to refer to social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace. In his influential…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community October 14, 2010

New Question Migration Paths

Several Area 51 sites have made it from being mere proposals to vibrant, thriving websites. Namely, webapps, gaming, ubuntu, webmasters, and very soon, cooking. And we’re about to have a heck of a lot more sites come out of beta. Thus, we need to handle migration of questions from site to site in a more…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community October 8, 2010

Search All Stack Exchange Sites

For as long as we’ve been working on Stack Overflow, we’ve been telling people that web search is our “homepage”. Just to prove it, I dug up our old Project Ask Elevator Pitch from FogBugz — and it’s right there at the top: The above document was last edited April 15th, 2008. Ah, memories… Don’t…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (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)
community September 11, 2010

Global Network Auto-Login

We now support automatically logging in to any site in the Stack Exchange network. By that I mean, as long as … You have recently logged in to any Stack Exchange network site You hold an existing account on the target site you’re navigating to You are using the same OpenID credentials … the site…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community August 27, 2010

New Tag Info Pages

When we rolled out our tag synonym and tag wiki support, I belatedly realized that tags were, completely by accident, third-class citizens in our ecosystem. By that, I mean tags had no real page to themselves. Think about it — if someone asked you about the [java] tag on Stack Overflow, where would you send…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community August 18, 2010

New Image Upload Support

Thanks to our good friends at imgur.com, we now support native image uploads on all Stack Exchange network websites. Yes, that means adding a picture to a question or answer is now as easy as … clicking the Insert Image toolbar button selecting an image from your computer, or the web clicking Upload … there…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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