Reference

background March 22, 2012

Respect the community – your own, and others’

In “Why Can’t You Have Just One Site?” Jeff wrote about the rationale for creating three sites instead of one, and the process for determining where a question belongs: Is it really so hard to figure out which community you belong to, and thus, where your question belongs? Ask yourself this: what is your job…
Avatar for Josh Heyer
Community Manager (former)
community February 29, 2012

Let’s Play The Guessing Game

We’ve observed a particular pattern of questions emerging on several Stack Exchange sites. All these questions are effectively guessing games. I remember myself playing this a bit childish, but in some ways awesome game, where you control a tank, and can pick up and stack turrets (and maybe something else) from enemy tanks you kill.…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community February 24, 2012

Stack Exchange’s Greatest Hits

We have a lot of Q&A; sites in the Stack Exchange network now. 84 at the current moment. That’s … a lot of Q&A; sites. But most people* don’t find us by browsing the site directory; they find us by encountering a Stack Exchange page in their web search results. So that may lead you…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community January 31, 2012

The Trouble With Popularity

Way back in 2008, we had Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, the founders and co-creators of Reddit, on the Stack Overflow podcast. We chatted about a bunch of stuff, but one of the things they said that always stuck with me was that Reddit always took an explicitly hands-off, no moderation approach to their content…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community December 8, 2011

Don’t Be Afraid to Use The Science

I saw an interesting Battlefield 3 question on gaming a few weeks ago. I’ve recently unlocked the EOD bot, and while playing around with it (and being hopelessly ineffectual with it) I’ve noticed that after I have driven a certain distance away I will return back to first-person view. Running towards the EOD bot will…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community August 19, 2011

The Future of Community Wiki

When you mark a post community wiki on a Stack Exchange site, that means … this post can be edited by anyone with 100 reputation this post does not generate any reputation for anyone when upvoted or downvoted The main advantage of community wiki — more editing — was nerfed when we introduced suggested edits.…
Avatar for Grace Note
Community Manager
community August 4, 2011

Supporting Community Conferences

One fun way to promote your community is to consider what upcoming conferences, seminars, conventions, events, or meetups appeal to your community and represent an opportunity to attract new, high quality users who love this stuff as much as we do! There are a bunch of ways the community team can support your events; to…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
area51 July 27, 2011

Does this site have a chance of succeeding?

Anytime you find yourself answering the same question over and over and over and over … blog post time. This is that blog post. This cycle has repeated itself on more sites than I can remember — When a new community approaches the end of their beta period, users start looking forward to graduation. So…
Avatar for Robert Cartaino
Director of Community Development (former)
community July 1, 2011

It’s OK to Ask and Answer Your Own Questions

The FAQ has contained one key bit of advice from the very beginning: It’s also perfectly fine to ask and answer your own question, as long as you pretend you’re on Jeopardy! — phrase it in the form of a question. So … if you have a question that you already know the answer to…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community June 23, 2011

Blog Overflow

Every Stack Exchange site starts with a Q&A site, made up of three pieces that help bring the whole community together: bicycles.stackexchange.com, the main Q&A site meta.bicycles.stackexchange.com, questions about community and administrative matters chat.bicycles.stackexchange.com, the third place for real-time collaborations But wait, there’s more? A couple months ago, the Super User community took it upon…
Avatar for Rebecca Chernoff
community April 7, 2011

Stack Overflow Around the World

It’s really inspiring to see Stack Overflow meetup events being held in almost 100 cities around the world. Here’s where the meetup groups are: That made me think again about Stack Exchange in other languages. Now, Stack Exchange isn’t just software. Localizing it isn’t just a matter of translating the strings. It’s a community, so…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
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