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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
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)
community April 26, 2009

Joke Questions: Please Refrain

The problem of joke questions has come up more than a few times now, so it’s worth going over how we will handle them. In a nutshell, please do not post joke questions. What do I mean by joke question? It’s a question that.. Looks authentic, but is a parody of a real question. Describes…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community April 23, 2009

Comments: Top n Shown

You’ll notice that the top 5 comments are now shown under each question or answer. If you want to see all the comments, or add a comment of your own, clicking will load the rest and reveal the comment entry box. The flagging and voting tools are still there for each comment, but require a…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community April 22, 2009

How Many Questions are Closed or Deleted?

Based on the discussion about The Stack Overflow Question Lifecycle, which I’d characterize very broadly this way… Programming Related Question -> Answers! Non-Programming Related Question -> Closed -> Deleted (eventually, depending) … I thought it would be a good idea to couch the discussion in terms of actual data. Here’s a breakdown of all the…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community April 17, 2009

The Stack Overflow Question Lifecycle

Apparently some users who really should know better are confused about the way Stack Overflow works. I take this as a sweeping indictment of our current FAQ (both official and unofficial) and I will work to correct this situation — starting with this blog post. Stack Overflow is, at its heart, a Question and Answer…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community April 16, 2009

Comments: Now with Flags and Votes

In tonight’s code push, we added the ability to vote for comments, and flag comments if they are inappropriate. Some ground rules: There is no downvoting of comments, only upvotes. Comment votes do not affect comment sort order. No reputation of any kind is earned or lost from comment votes. Each user gets 5 comment…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company April 14, 2009

Logo Contest Winner for serverfault.com

The logo design contest for serverfault.com is now complete. The winner was Joshua Cliff, with entry #184. What I liked about this logo is the thematic similarity to Stack Overflow, while invoking the idea of a server rack along with a graphic equalizer style health readout for the fault. Congratulations to Joshua, who describes himself…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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