background December 13, 2008

UserVoice Supports OpenID

I noticed that our friends at UserVoice now support OpenID: This means you can (finally) log into both sites (stackoverflow.com and stackoverflow.uservoice.com) using the very same OpenID. I believe they’re using RPXNow to implement this feature. Hooray for open interoperability, and open identity standards! So I guess that’s what Richard was hinting at when we…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company December 10, 2008

Server Hosting — Rent vs. Buy?

As Stack Overflow continues to grow, it’s time to revisit our server hosting situation. We currently rent two identical dedicated servers from CrystalTech, which has been an excellent and responsive host for not only SO but Coding Horror as well. If you’re in the market for Windows hosting, I can recommend them without reservation. Although…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company December 1, 2008

Why Can’t I Accept My Own Answer?

One question that comes up a lot in Stack Overflow meta-discussion is this one: Why can’t I accept my own answer to my question? In case it isn’t clear, asking a question on Stack Overflow confers a few special privileges to you as the question owner: You can comment on your questions, even if you…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company November 25, 2008

Stack Overflow Is You

I was surprised to find the following question on Stack Overflow: Jon Skeet Facts Apparently this “question” is.. somewhat controversial; as of now it has 31 revisions and 65 comments. It was opened by Bill the Lizard, who accepted this answer, from Jon Skeet, appropriately enough: These are written in the third person so as…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
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,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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