company November 1, 2008

SQL 2008 Full-Text Search Problems

You may have noticed that things have been less responsive than usual on stackoverflow.com. The culprit is SQL Server 2008 full-text search. I’ll let Brent explain: Before 2008, full text search wasn’t inside the database – it wasn’t subject to things like transactions. Heck, it was more like Lucene where it lived outside on its…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company October 29, 2008

Added a Second Server

Based on traffic levels last week — we’re at and beyond where we were at launch — I decided it was time to pursue adding a second server. The second stackoverflow.com server has identical specifications to our first server, that is: Windows Server 2008 x64 Dual Quad-Core Xeon E5320 (1.8 GHz) 4 GB RAM 271GB…
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Co-Founder (Former)
background October 26, 2008

See You At PDC 2008

I will be attending the Microsoft Professional Developers’ Conference this year, courtesy of Microsoft. The main reason I am attending is to help Phil Haack deliver a session about ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications Monday, October 27th 3:30 pm — 4:45 pm Room 153 Phil invited me to talk…
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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,…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company October 23, 2008

Stack Overflow OpenID Case Study

JanRain, an early supporter of OpenID, just posted an OpenID case study featuring Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow, much like Wikipedia, lets anyone edit anything – but unlike Wikipedia, we require users to earn a certain number of votes from other users before the system trusts them (we call this “reputation”). The concept of identity and…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company October 21, 2008

Expressing Your Tag Preferences

Geoff “the malice from corvallis” Dalgas has done it again. Over the last week he was busy implementing the number one UserVoice request — tag preferences for a customized Stack Overflow homepage. You’ll notice there are two places you can now enter your ignored tags and interesting tags. On most question pages, in the right…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company October 17, 2008

Stack Overflow Search – Now 51% Less Crappy

Believe it or not, the search function on Stack Overflow may just actually.. work.. now. I started to feel really bad when I’d see people post duplicate questions, even after they said they “searched first”. Now, to be clear, we do a fuzzy title-based search when you tab off the title field on the Ask…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company October 13, 2008

Tags AND Tags OR Tags

Until recently, we hadn’t done a good job of providing a user interface for combining tags. You’ll notice that all the question browsers now show “related tags”, with a count of how many tags are shown for whatever view you happen to be in (with the exception of search): Let’s say I clicked on the…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company October 12, 2008

A Question About Questions

Stack Overflow is a place for programming questions. We’ve been quite clear about this for as long as I can remember; the faq and about pages both try to make this point in the first paragraph: What kind of questions can I ask here? Programming questions, of course! As long as your question is: detailed…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company October 6, 2008

Solving the “Fastest Gun in the West” problem

Some Stack Overflow users are concerned about what they call the “Fastest Gun in the West” problem: Each question’s answers are sorted by descending score and then descending time of posting. This means that if a person sits down and answers a question in a long, thorough way, going through every nook and cranny, once…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company October 5, 2008

You’re My Favorite

We just implemented another highly requested feature — the ability to mark a question as a favorite. You might have already noticed it by now, as every question has a large, clickable favorite star just under the voting arrows. Click to favorite. Click again to un-favorite. Once favorited, these questions will show up in the…
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Co-Founder (Former)
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