CHAOS has been searching for the perfect way to promote activity on our sites for a while now. After all, before you can try to recruit new users, you need to engage your existing community. Since we’re a network of Q&A websites, a natural place to start is having question-asking contests. Some of our contests [...]

To celebrate the holidays, Gaming Stack Exchange is throwing a little holiday party — specifically, a Hat Dash: Between December 16 and January 6, users can unlock hats for their gravatars on gaming.stackexchange.com by asking and answering questions, voting, sharing links, etc.  For more info, read the full blog post: Holiday 2011 Hat Dash: The Hattening There’s also [...]

Anyone who has seen pictures or video from our office in the last few months has probably noticed a small addition in the form of five large screens mounted in the middle of it.  The screens came about when we were first hiring CHAOS and realized that we wanted an easy way to visualize and [...]

As you may have noticed, we’re throwing a party over on the Gaming site. If you’re not a gamer, you may not know that two huge games came out this week: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.  Game launches are always big for gaming.stackexchange.com because they’re a unique opportunity to [...]

Three months ago, CHAOS was born unto this world. There were just three of us to begin with, and nobody had any clue what our team was supposed to be accomplishing. Well, that’s not completely true: from Joel’s blog post, we knew that our eventual goal was to grow the Stack Exchange communities past some [...]

This past weekend, CHAOS was working the New York Comic Con (NYCC) here in New York City. It was kind of amazing. But CHAOS wasn’t the only one working hard this weekend…. Meet Bubbles, the Stack Exchange mascot! Some of you might recognize her from her cameo on the podcast video stream a few weeks [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Have you noticed the new ads appearing on all of the Stack Exchange sites? That’s right, despite a well-publicized aversion to email spam, we’ve added weekly newsletters to all Stack Exchange sites! The site newsletters are meant for all of those sites that you find interesting but aren’t quite addicted to enough to visit every [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

We’re at that time of year where we go through everybody’s salary and makes sure it’s reasonable. We’re up to about a dozen in-house software developers, and we’d been paying them based on a compensation system developed by our cousins at Fog Creek, which is different enough from Stack Exchange that there was some chafing. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In March 2010, we rebalanced our reputation system to favor answers. While we value good questions (and asking a great question is absolutely an art), we want to explicitly encourage people to provide the best possible answers. Without people interested in providing good answers, the questions are moot. We know that answers have more intrinsic [...]

Like most sites, it’s hard to figure out the number of users on Stack Exchange. The widest possible number is the number of unique visitors, most of whom just read our content and move on. That number is now around 19,000,000 according to Google Analytics or 14,000,000 according to Quantcast – the difference comes from [...]

You may have seen our vote-based advertising for open source projects on Stack Overflow — Stack Overflow users create ads for their favorite open source projects, and the community votes for the projects they’d like to see promoted on the site. In response to the popularity of that program, we’ve extended this vote based advertising [...]