Design

Every question on Stack Overflow, or any other Stack Exchange site, must be tagged with at least one tag. Tags are simple keywords or labels that help categorize your question with other, similar questions. It’s important that questions get tagged correctly, because that makes it easier for everyone to find the questions they’re interested in…

Remember our old pal Sam Saffron? He’s been toiling away on a feature that has been heavily requested for over a year now — associating badges with the posts they were earned on. As of now, every new badge award — and most historically awarded badges — will tell you exactly why you got that…

We originally rolled out the question bounty system in January 2009. It has worked fairly well, in terms of motivating answerers and increasing the connection between askers and answerers. But I think we made some mistakes in being overly strict in our design of the bounty system. Just take a look at some of these…

The ability to cast a question deletion vote against a closed question is earned at 10,000 reputation. It was always intended as a tool for getting rid of useless, bottom-of-the barrel type closed question content. But lately we’ve had to deal with a rash of question deletions, some of which I felt destroyed useful answers.…

After a whopping 18 month gestation, we’ve finally implemented the Generalist badge. The Generalist badge works as follows: Provided non-wiki answers of 15 total score in 20 of the top 40 tags. The top 40 tag list is surprisingly diverse across the entire Trilogy. Just check out the top 40 tags (as of this writing)…

We’re bringing back a feature we had to put on ice way back when we launched Server Fault*: automatic account association. Due largely to the vagaries of how Google implemented OpenID, we reluctantly made account association a manual process. But not any more. As OpenID has matured, we’ve figured out a way to make it…

We just added a Linked sidebar to the question page. Here’s an example from the current Super User question Now that MS Money is going away, what are the best competitive options? The Linked sidebar is very straightforward: it gathers up any links to this question provided by the community via comments, answers, or questions,…

We’ve had inline tagging as a moderator-only feature for quite a while, and it’s been fairly stable, so we decided to roll it out to all users with 10,000 reputation or more. If you have the requisite 10k reputation, just mouse over the tags on any question page, and an “edit tags” menu item will…