community April 13, 2009

Stack Overflow Voting Pattern Analysis

Stack Overflow user John Cook recently wrote a blog entry analyzing Stack Overflow reputation scores: The reputation scores follow the expected power law distribution. No surprise there, of course. John explains: This graph was based on a snapshot of the user reputations one day last week. The largest group, 15,219 users, had reputation less than…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community April 11, 2009

Raising a Red Flag

Are you familiar with the way craigslist handles post flagging? Based on recent feedback, we’re enhancing Stack Overflow’s flagging support to bring it more in line with that well established model. We belatedly realized that asking users to email us to report content problems on the site* was not exactly efficient. Now you can flag…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community April 8, 2009

In Defense of Editing

Editing is the backbone of Stack Overflow, and probably (along with the reputation system) one of the single most important distinctions between Stack Overflow and “just another forum”. What’s so special about editing? You might as well ask what’s so special about editing on Wikipedia? Uh… everything? As it says in the FAQ: Other people…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community April 6, 2009

A Day in the Penalty Box

Are you familiar with the Penalty Box? The penalty box (sometimes called the sin bin, bad box, or bin) is the area in ice hockey, rugby football and some other sports where a player sits to serve the time of a given penalty, for an offense not severe enough to merit outright expulsion from the…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community April 5, 2009

What Stack Overflow Can Teach You

We get wonderful emails from programmers almost every week, programmers who are impressed with the effectiveness of Stack Overflow and the platform agnostic community spirit it embodies. We consider ourselves very fortunate to be in a position to get such email, and we greatly appreciate each and every one of them. I always reply and…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company April 4, 2009

Logo Design Contest for serverfault.com

Since we had such good results from our previous community logo contest, we’re doing the same thing for serverfault.com: We have a serverfault.com logo design contest at 99 designs, with a prize of $29 at stake. This time I’ve also added $50 prizes for second and third place. I always felt bad that the logos…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community April 2, 2009

No, We Have Not Forgotten About the Hacker Badge

In case you were wondering, no, we haven’t forgotten about the Hacker Badge. Which is sort of like Eric Raymond’s universal hacker emblem. It’s explained thusly by Mr. Raymond: When you put the glider emblem on your web page, or wear it on clothing, or display it in some other way, you are visibly associating…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company April 1, 2009

Tuesday Outage: It”s RAID-tastic!

We had a brief outage early Tuesday morning from 3 AM – 5 AM PST, because the database server was doing this: Oh noes! Not … !!! CRITICAL ERROR: Memory retention failure, unflushed cache lost !!! There are six exclamation points so you know it’s serious. Also, you have to press ENTER. Because it’s a…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community March 25, 2009

Responsible Advertising: Feed a Programmer

We’re now experimenting with serving up a small AdSense banner for users with less than 200 reputation. This banner appears just under the title of any question. Up to 90 percent of our traffic is from Google now. We feel that users arriving from Google search will be accustomed to seeing a small ad banner…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community March 21, 2009

More Voting Anomalies

In December we began tracking and removing anomalous voting patterns. This happens automatically as part of a daily script, and it’s worked well to date, nullifying the most egregious upvoting and downvoting anomalies. I’ve been getting a few reports of further voting issues via the email link provided at the bottom of every Stack Overflow…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community March 20, 2009

Nominate a New Stack Overflow Moderator

Stack Overflow has exactly four moderators: Joel, Jeff (me), Jarrod, and Geoff. It’s no coincidence that the list of moderators is identical to the list of co-founders and mainline developers. As we launch the upcoming IT / SysAdmin sister site, we’ve had very little luck locating notable folks from that community to act as moderators…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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