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 [...]

It has been a year and a half since we launched Data Explorer. In the past few months Tim Stone (on a community grant) and I have pushed a major round of changes. Thanks Tim! Recap on last years changes Since we publicly launched data explorer, the most notable change contributed back from the community [...]

More than a year and a half ago we unveiled the first version of the Stack Exchange API to the wider world.  Since then we’ve had a minor point release, improved app and script listing, and shared some statistics about the consumers of our API. I’ve been pretty pleased with version 1.1, stackexchange.com and our chat [...]

Each of our 73 sites has a common goal: to own their community. Taking ownership means (in part) figuring out how to promote the site, make it attractive to newcomers, and make the awesome content and community even more awesome. While we have internal- and external-facing teams of employees to help with this, Stack Exchange [...]

The holiday season is upon us, and as another year comes to an end, it is Stack Overflow Annual User Survey time again! So, take a break from wrapping gifts and come tell us about yourself. We promise it will only take a few minutes of your time. Of course, as the “annual” implies, we’ve [...]

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 [...]

For almost two years, we’ve reached out to our programmer communities to support open-source projects. Free Vote-Based Advertising for Open Source Projects It’s time once again to publicize your favorite open-source projects in need of programmer assistance. Every six months, we accept new submissions for free open-sourced advertising to be served in an ad slot [...]

Stack Exchange gets a staggering amount of questions and answers every day. Our goal is not only to provide great answers to the huge amount of questions, but to create awesome gems of knowledge that can be consumed by generations to come. New users on our sites need some extra TLC. Without them we can [...]

Our track record on email notifications has been mixed at best. Since early 2009, we’ve had some forms of email notification, including: A checkbox under each question you own, asking if you want email notifications for that specific question. A long since removed “oh, you’ve been away for 7 days, so we will mail you [...]

We’re pleased to announce that Stack Exchange is now an institutional member of the TeX Users Group. The TeX Users Group (TUG) is a non-profit organization supporting the the TeX typesetting system community — or anyone generally interested in furthering the fields of typography and font design. It’s popular within many academic disciplines, several of [...]

It’s been a little over a year since our last improvement to the bounty system. Question bounties have been working well enough that we’re comfortable encouraging even more use of the bounty system. We used to limit people to one question bounty at a time, but now you can have up to three simultaneous question [...]

For the past couple months, we’ve had a new team starting up out of our NY office, CHAOS (or if you’re not into that whole brevity thing: Cheerful Helpful Advocates of Stack Exchange).  You’ve probably seen them around some of the sites or run into them in one of the chat rooms – but here’s [...]

As I’ve said many times, the reason any Stack Exchange site works is not because of the magical software bits, but because the people participating are smart, talented, and willing to teach and learn. That’s right, any internet community ultimately succeeds or fails on the strength and quality of its contributors. Shocking, I know! But [...]

The badge system exists for two reasons: to teach new users how Stack Exchange works to encourage activities we view as positive to the community As the engine grows and evolves, we discover new areas that need badges. In fact, we’ve added a bevy of new badges in the last 6 months or so that [...]

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. [...]

Who would win in a fight between a Gorilla and a Shark? OK, maybe you’re thinking that’s a ridiculous question. Perhaps it is. But various forms of this question get asked all the time. Consider this now-ancient Stack Overflow question titled Python v. Perl: Okay, so I’m finally making the jump into scripting languages and [...]

You might know Chris better as “Grace Note,” the moderator extraordinaire on our Gaming Stack Exchange. I appointed Chris to a pro tem moderator position nearly a year ago. I wasn’t an avid user of Gaming SE, but I was continually amazed how often Chris’s name kept popping up in our moderator chat room. Chris was [...]

Every Stack Exchange question is required to have at least one tag; tags are how we group, order, and find questions. But how do you determine which tags are correct for your question? When you start typing in the tags field we display a simple list of existing tags that match what you’ve typed so [...]

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 [...]

Hi everyone! I’m the math intern, and I thought I’d introduce myself by sharing a little something from what I’ve been doing. A little about me: I’m a moderator and frequent contributor at math.SE: In real life, I’m a rising senior at MIT. I have a math blog, Annoying Precision, which unfortunately is not very [...]