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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

Another long-standing request, dating all the way back to 2009, is for a mobile optimized view of Stack Overflow. Since … the existing HTML and CSS was (and still is) rather light the original iPhone did a great job rendering Stack Overflow mobile traffic on Stack Overflow is only about 1% of traffic … we [...]

Every Stack Exchange question and answer pair is intended to be an evergreen, editable resource for future travelers: The editing feature is there so that old question/answer pairs can get better and better. For every person who asks a question and gets an answer on Stack Exchange, hundreds or thousands of people will come read [...]

If you’ve logged in to a Stack Exchange site recently you may have noticed a new button on the login page: That’s right — Stack Exchange is now officially an OpenID provider as well as an OpenID (and OAuth 2.0) consumer! As a provider, we can now offer a totally seamless signup experience for new [...]

Back in January we rebooted our search implementation, replacing it with Lucene.Net. We’ve been quite happy with the results, which are faster, more relevant, and … perhaps not Google quality, but certainly getting closer to the realm of Googlesque. We are also big fans of the Lucene.Net project, which has had some rocky times of [...]

When the wordpress.stackexchange.com community asked Why are questions not being voted on … I have noticed a trend that questions (even good ones) that have multiple answers are not being voted on. Out of our 5,550 questions only 41% have at least 1 vote which leaves around 3,000 with 0 votes and a few hundred [...]

We use Markdown for text formatting on all Stack Exchange sites. Markdown isn’t difficult to figure out, particularly since it apes common ASCII formatting conventions — and its simplicity means it is amenable to wiki style differencing and editing, which is a big part of our engine. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do a [...]

If you participate on multiple Stack Exchange sites, you now have a global profile page! You can navigate there via the handy network profile link on your user page. From your network profile, you can get a mile high view of all your activity across every site in our network. Yep, all of ‘em! The [...]

If you’ve used any Stack Exchange site over the last year, you’re probably familiar with “the envelope”. The envelope was a notification system that … sort of … let you know when things happened on the site. As time went on, it became clear that the envelope was a deeply flawed design. I began thinking [...]

In the spirit of our recent redesign of the users page, we felt it was time to enhance the tags page, too. As you can see, the tags page now shows a bit more information about each tag, namely: The first three lines of the tag wiki excerpt for the tag. The number of questions [...]

After 2.5 years of being almost unchanged, we decided it was high time the Users page got a redesign. The old user page was fine, in a late 2008 sort of way, but it ultimately became a bit monotonous — every time you viewed it, you’d see more or less the same list of top [...]

The Stack Exchange engine draws inspiration from a number of sources. We continue to be great admirers of Wikipedia, but we’ve always missed out on one crucial aspect of their system: we never allowed anonymous users to edit content. No, that required earning privileges through participation — specifically, the retag privilege at 500 reputation and [...]