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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In A Recipe to Promote your Site, Robert provided a great set of guidelines for organically growing your Q&A community. Buried within was this observation: Reach the right kind of publications and bloggers. Make sure that the key experts in every field know about the site; not just the “Martha Stewart” big names; we want [...]

On Podcast #58, Joel and I had a disagreement. Not the first, and certainly won’t be the last: Joel says that the only bad simple question is a duplicate simple question. I say simple questions are OK as long as they’re actually interesting (in some way) for other users to consider and answer. To prove [...]

In A Recipe to Promote your Site we noted that we would match community effort with funds: Any community that shows sufficient effort and innovative ideas to promote their site will be offered a budget and resources to make those ideas happen. Think of it as matching funds — except we’re matching effort, innovation, resources, [...]

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 [...]

In Good Subjective, Bad Subjective, we made a pretty solid first stab at defining a constructive subjective question, one that I’ve been happy with so far. Constructive subjective questions: inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”. tend to have long, not short, answers. have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone. invite sharing experiences over opinions. [...]

Have you ever noticed how certain questions come up again and again on Stack Overflow sites? Oh look, my PC is freezing. Should I use SELECT *? Oh, and, how can I host a server from home? Really, people, do you want to be answering these same questions ten years from now? How about when [...]

I recently had a long discussion on gaming meta regarding “Help me remember this game” questions. I’ll spare you all the gory details; my general conclusion was this: If we get an excellent user who asks a good, thoughtful [game] identification question and sticks around in our community to participate, then it’s worth allowing it [...]

Over the last 2.5 years, we’ve identified a few problematic classes of questions that tend to get asked on our sites. Many of these are documented in our standard set of close reasons: exact duplicate, off-topic, subjective and argumentative, not a real question, and too localized. However, as we launched the great Super User experiment, [...]

At 90 days into beta, we’re supposed to evaluate each Area 51 beta site and either “pass” or “fail” them as full Stack Exchange sites. Some sites feel they’re not going to make it. Please do not close GIS SE The Geographic Information Systems SE site has one more day of beta. We are Excellent [...]

A while ago, I wrote: “Individually-branded sites felt more authentic and trustworthy. We thought that letting every Stack Exchange site have its own domain name, visual identity, logo, and brand would help the community feel more coherent. After all, nobody wants to say that they live in Housing Block 2938TC.” Well, funny thing… that didn’t [...]

As Stack Overflow has grown, it has started to have some decidedly big city problems. The one we are most concerned about is an influx of very low quality questions. While we still believe in editing and improving low-quality questions to make them better, there’s a fundamental mismatch in scale and effort here — bad [...]

Stack Exchange is about questions with objective, factual answers. We’ve been crystal clear about this for as long as I can remember, even back to the earliest, pre-beta days of Stack Overflow. It’s right there in the standard Stack Exchange FAQ: What kind of questions should I not ask here? Avoid asking questions that are [...]