community May 19, 2009

Welcome New Community Moderators

The Stack Overflow moderator election is now complete. There were two users who clearly ran away from the pack in the voting: Marc Gravell and Bill the Lizard. Between the two of them, they accounted for almost a third of all the 2,880 votes cast. It was a tough choice determining such a close race…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community May 18, 2009

A Theory of Moderation

We believe deeply in community moderation. That’s why we appoint Pro Tempore Moderators and, ideally, democratically elected community moderators for every site in our network. But what do community moderators do? The short answer is, as little as possible! From the very first version of Stack Overflow faq way back in mid-2008, our goal has…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community May 17, 2009

Server Fault Public Beta Nears

The Server Fault private beta is going well; it looks like the Server Fault public beta will begin May 25th. It’s been challenging to find the right community for Server Fault, which is intended for IT professionals and System Administrators. Launching Stack Overflow, a site for programmers, was much easier in comparison, because Joel Spolsky…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community May 15, 2009

Now Earn Valuable Flair!

You know what you need? Besides a haircut, I mean? More flair. STAN I need to talk about your flair. JOANNA Really? I have 15 buttons on. I, uh, (shows him) STAN Well, ok, 15 is minimum, ok? JOANNA Ok. STAN Now, it’s up to you whether or not you want to just do the…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community May 12, 2009

Stack Overflow Developer Days Conference

Joel mentioned this in passing on one of the podcasts, but I didn’t want to steal his thunder, so I’ll let him explain: We decided to launch a series of Stack Overflow events: the first gathering of the tribe of great developers making Stack Overflow so successful that over 90% of questions get answered. It’s…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community May 7, 2009

Interesting and Ignored Tags Now Support Wildcards

Today’s new feature will be useful for those of you who happen to have a lot of ignored and/or interesting tags. You can now use the asterisk to set up wildcard matches, rather than having to laboriously construct a list of every single tag as before. This was a fairly highly voted request on UserVoice,…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community May 6, 2009

Stack Overflow Moderator Voting Now Open

As mentioned on March 20th, we are looking for a new Stack Overflow moderator to be chosen by the Stack Overflow community itself. I walked through the first 30 comments to that post and gathered up the nominations (except the self-nominations and those who recused themselves), and voting is now open: http://stackoverflow.com/users/vote-moderator To be eligible…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background May 2, 2009

Joel Talks About Stack Overflow at Google

On April 24th, Joel Spolsky gave a talk at Google on Stack Overflow. The talk was recorded and is available for viewing on YouTube. The talk highlights how, from the very beginning, we designed Stack Overflow to be a destination page for web search. We explicitly optimize for “drive-by” programmers who type a problem into…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
beta April 30, 2009

Server Fault Private Beta begins

We’re launching the Server Fault private beta tonight. What is Server Fault? Server Fault is for system administrators and IT professionals, people who manage or maintain computers in a professional capacity. If you are in charge of … servers networks many desktop PCs (other than your own) … then you’re in the right place to…
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Co-Founder (Former)
beta April 30, 2009

Google’s OpenIDs are Unique Per-Domain

If you’ve been trying to log in to the serverfault.com private beta and haven’t been able to, here’s probably why: You use Google’s (otherwise excellent) OpenID support on Stack Overflow. As we just discovered, Google’s OpenIDs are unique per-domain. Thus, the OpenID string key “fingerprint” that we use to identify you on Stack Overflow is…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community April 29, 2009

Handling Duplicate Questions

As we get more and more questions in Stack Overflow, the issue of duplicate questions becomes more pressing. The odds of any question being a duplicate, however small, increases with the total number of questions in the system. So it’s worth considering: what makes a question an exact duplicate? As I see it, there are…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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