community December 31, 2008

I Move to Close This Question

As an active Stack Overflow user, one of the abilities you’ll gain at 3,000 reputation is the ability to close and reopen questions. Closed questions don’t allow any new answers to be added, but can still be edited and commented on. All it takes is one user (with the appropriate reputation level, natch) to decide…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community December 31, 2008

Daily Dose of Daily Reputation Cap

It’s your daily dose of everyone’s best friend, the +200 per day Stack Overflow reputation cap! Did you know that… Without the +200 per day reputation cap, a certain Stack Overflow user would have almost 60,000 reputation? Implementing a logarithmic decline in the value of upvotes would make almost no difference to most people’s reputation scores?…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
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…
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…
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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)
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