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…
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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…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company October 13, 2008

Tags AND Tags OR Tags

Until recently, we hadn’t done a good job of providing a user interface for combining tags. You’ll notice that all the question browsers now show “related tags”, with a count of how many tags are shown for whatever view you happen to be in (with the exception of search): Let’s say I clicked on the…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company October 12, 2008

A Question About Questions

Stack Overflow is a place for programming questions. We’ve been quite clear about this for as long as I can remember; the faq and about pages both try to make this point in the first paragraph: What kind of questions can I ask here? Programming questions, of course! As long as your question is: detailed…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company October 6, 2008

Solving the “Fastest Gun in the West” problem

Some Stack Overflow users are concerned about what they call the “Fastest Gun in the West” problem: Each question’s answers are sorted by descending score and then descending time of posting. This means that if a person sits down and answers a question in a long, thorough way, going through every nook and cranny, once…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company October 5, 2008

You’re My Favorite

We just implemented another highly requested feature — the ability to mark a question as a favorite. You might have already noticed it by now, as every question has a large, clickable favorite star just under the voting arrows. Click to favorite. Click again to un-favorite. Once favorited, these questions will show up in the…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company September 30, 2008

OK, Now Define “Answered

One thing we’ve learned on Stack Overflow is that asking questions is easy. But how do you tell when a question has been answered? For a community predicated on the value of getting answers to your programming questions, it’s sort of… important… to know when unanswered questions are hanging around out there in the ether.…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company September 30, 2008

I Don’t Give a Damn About My Reputation

Geoff Dalgas did a bang-up job implementing the #1 UserVoice requested item — and he did it all while we were away on our NYC trip, no less! You’ll notice there is a now a Reputation tab on everyone’s user page, which includes a graph of your reputation over time a summary of the actual…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company September 21, 2008

What Was Stack Overflow Built With?

This question keeps coming up a lot on Stack Overflow for some reason: What was Stack Overflow built with? Some even wondered if Stack Overflow was built in Ruby on Rails. I consider that a compliment! This question has been covered in some detail in our podcasts, of course, but I know not everyone has…
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Co-Founder (Former)
beta September 15, 2008

Then a Miracle Occurs – Public Beta

stackoverflow.com is now live and open to the public, as a public beta. Our heartfelt thanks to all the software developers who so patiently helped us test the site during the private beta. You are the true heroes of this project, contributing your time in creating over 8,500 questions in a month and a half…
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Co-Founder (Former)
beta September 11, 2008

Help Us Beta Test

If you’d like to help us beta test Stack Overflow, in advance of the Monday launch, here’s how: Go to beta.stackoverflow.com Enter “twitter@twitter.com” and “falkensmaze” to gain access (note that this is NOT an account: it’s merely a password to gain access to the beta) Please do bear in mind the beta test guidelines. When…
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Co-Founder (Former)
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