company December 28, 2008

Reverse Engineering the WMD Editor

We’ve been quite happy with the WMD Markdown editor on Stack Overflow, kindly provided by the author, John Fraser of AttackLabs. However, there are definitely some outstanding bugs and issues with it that we’d like to fix. Progress on this front has been severely hampered by three problems: We only have obfuscated / minified versions…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community December 27, 2008

New UserVoice Moderators

Over the last few months, I’ve noticed a few users that have been exceptionally active on the Stack Overflow UserVoice feedback site. I have extended UserVoice moderator privileges to Joel Coehoorn (it’s pronounced koo-horn) and Sean Massa. I wasn’t kidding when I said this in the Stack Overflow FAQ: At the high end of this…
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Co-Founder (Former)
background December 24, 2008

A Stack Overflow Holiday

Joel and I started recording a podcast yesterday, but we belatedly realized things are quite slow as this is a holiday week. We decided to postpone until next week so we’d have meatier topics to discuss. Thus, no Stack Overflow podcast this week. But I do have a bit of good news — I am…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company December 23, 2008

Vote Fraud and You

As we discovered in the Stack Overflow podcast with the Reddit guys, they have a hidden mechanism for detecting and defeating revenge voting patterns. I suppose it’s a measure of how naive we are, but this wasn’t even on our radar. Well, now it is. If you irritate another user, they might be having a…
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Co-Founder (Former)
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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)
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