community December 7, 2010

Stack Overflow + RHoK = Partners in Hacker Goodness

We were approached by the nice people at Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) to help them promote their worldwide event last weekend (December 3-5).  Since our audience on Stack Overflow and Server Fault seemed like a good fit with their inspiring mission, we agreed to toss some banner ad impressions their way. If you’re not…
Avatar for Alison Sperling
Director of Marketing (former)
community December 2, 2010

Stack Exchange Moderator Elections Begin

Back in July, we appointed Moderators Pro Tempore for the nascent Stack Exchange 2.0 communities. Leadership is critical to any community’s success, and the bootstrapping of a community often requires those leaders to be appointed before the community is large enough or organized enough to elect them itself. Our fellow moderators Pro Tempore have been…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community November 29, 2010

The Pee-Wee Herman Rule

I recently had a long discussion on gaming meta regarding “Help me remember this game” questions. I’ll spare you all the gory details; my general conclusion was this: If we get an excellent user who asks a good, thoughtful [game] identification question and sticks around in our community to participate, then it’s worth allowing it…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community November 23, 2010

Q&A is Hard, Let’s Go Shopping!

Over the last 2.5 years, we’ve identified a few problematic classes of questions that tend to get asked on our sites. Many of these are documented in our standard set of close reasons: exact duplicate, off-topic, subjective and argumentative, not a real question, and too localized. However, as we launched the great Super User experiment,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
careers November 9, 2010

What’s a CV Anyway?

When I first started working at Stack Overflow, I wondered why the candidate’s work experience is referred to as a CV on Stack Overflow Careers. I honestly thought Stack Overflow might be a European company or maybe they were just being snobs. A resume is your work experience written up on a piece of paper…
Avatar for Alison Sperling
Director of Marketing (former)
community November 9, 2010

Stack Overflow Homepage Changes

As I mentioned in The Horror of No Answer: Revival and Necromancer: It’s fine — expected, even — for there to be a “long tail” of questions that are too obscure, too narrow, or just plain unanswerable for whatever reason. Sometimes you have to be patient; it takes the time it takes. But seeing the…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community November 4, 2010

Tag Sets on Stack Exchange

Over the last few months, we’ve been continually improving our central network hub at stackexchange.com: Launched with reputation leagues, network-wide hot questions, and a global site directory Added the ability to customize which Stack Exchange sites appear in your hot questions Added the ability to search all Stack Exchange sites After a two week public…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community November 3, 2010

The Horror of No Answer: Revival and Necromancer

On the Stack Exchange network, we define an “unanswered question” as a question with no upvoted answers. This is a very, very strict definition. The way we define it, your question could still technically be unanswered even if it has multiple answers — so long as none of those answers have received their first upvote.…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company November 3, 2010

Stack Exchange at Ubuntu Developer Summit

Last week, I was graciously invited to spend a few days at the Ubuntu Developer Summit held in Orlando, Florida. Twice a year, Canonical engineers, partners, and community members get together to discuss and plan the next release of their operating system. I was invited to talk about Ask Ubuntu to help in the planning…
Avatar for Robert Cartaino
Director of Community Development (former)
background November 1, 2010

Rovio: Or, How to Annoy Your Coworkers From 2,800 Miles Away

I’m a big fan of annoying my coworkers. Problem is, I don’t have any coworkers because I work remotely from home. An impossible conundrum. Or is it? Enter Rovio, the wi-fi enabled robotic WebCam. Rovio got mixed reviews, but we decided to give it a shot anyway. You control Rovio through a web browser interface,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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