One of our New Year’s resolutions here at Stack Exchange is to take a hard look at our user experience. As the network has grown and our audience expanded, the system has grown with it – but there are some rough edges in places that can use a bit of smoothing. You’ll be seeing a lot of improvements over the next few months, but today I’d like to announce the first bit of polish: built-in profile pictures.

We have used Gravatar to let you manage your profile picture since roughly six to eight weeks before Stack Overflow entered beta. Gravatar is a wonderful service that lets you use a consistent, recognizable image for yourself across many different services and sites. It’s free, it’s fairly easy to add support for it (which made it a great fit for Stack Overflow in the early days), it doesn’t require any special configuration to make it work on multiple sites (which made it a great fit as Stack Exchange grew) and best of all it supports distinct, recognizable default images for folks who haven’t uploaded their own.

There’s one problem: if you don’t have a Gravatar account, you can’t have a custom picture. One basic bit of personalization turns into Yet Another Username & Password, which is annoying if Stack Exchange is the only place you would ever use it, and somewhat embarrassing considering our support for OpenID means you don’t need another set of credentials to use Stack Exchange itself!

So from now on, anyone who wants a custom picture can simply upload one from their computer or the web. If you hover your mouse over your picture on your profile page, you’ll see a new link to ”change picture”:

Click on that, click the “Upload a new picture” button, select a picture from your computer (or enter the URL of an image on the web), and finally click the “Upload” button. That’s it.

If you decide to switch back to your Gravatar, you can do that at any time:

As always, you can have a different picture and bio for each site, or use the button at the bottom of your profile edit page to copy everything network wide. And since we default to Gravatar for profile pictures, your existing photos (or abstract patterns) will remain unchanged until you want them to change.

We would like to thank Alan and team at Imgur for doing the image hosting and being incredibly helpful during the whole process. They turned what would’ve been a major development effort into something we could roll out in a couple of weeks.

Try it out, and let us know what you think on meta!

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You’re listening to the Stack Exchange Podcast #40 (We apologize to everyone who expected Wil Wheaton last week)  Your hosts are David Fullerton, Jay Hanlon, and Joel Spolsky.  We also have a surprise special guest: Britton Payne, professor of Copyright, Trademark, and Emerging Technologies at Fordham University. He knows a lot of things about software patent law, so we grabbed him as he walked by the studio to talk to us.

• About 15 years ago, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to create some useful guidelines for the new digital landscape. We talk about what actually happens with the DMCA takedown notices, including loophole issues that Joel has discovered.
• So that’s one part of the DMCA. The other one is anti-circumvention technology, and we go through many of the nuances there.
• So the technological means of anti-circumvention have to be re-evaluated every now and then. New exemptions were announced in October regarding: ebook reading assisted technologies (like Amazon Kindles being able to read aloud to you); jailbreaking phones (not tablets); and unlocking phone handsets (not tablets).
• This has been Copyright Update #1 on the Stack Exchange Podcast, brough to you by Britton Payne!
• So what else is going on in the Stack Exchange universe? We just had a holidays! Part of our celebration included Winter Bash, which ends “today” (at time of recording). You can still check out all the details. Give us your thoughts about it on Meta.
• …including a “hat” that was a tribute to Jason Punyon, who is in a rock (jazz and disco, really) band. They played our holiday party at the Hotel Rivington, and they were astonishingly good.
• We have a couple new sites to talk about - Politics & Anime. Each has just over 250 questions, so they’re doing okay, for baby sites. We discuss the pitfalls and strengths of each of these new members of our network (especially Politics).
• (Somehow we get onto the topic of the Black Hebrew Israelites.)
• Politics is a difficult site to approach, but it’s not hard to pass the bar of being better than anything else that’s out there on the internet, and we’re well on our way to doing that.
• We turn to Anime. None of us know very much about anime, but we manage to turn this site into a conversation anyway.
• No news is good news, new-office-wise! Construction is constructioning. We’re moving in March, or so.
• There’s a glimmer in Joel’s eye called Stack Overflow TV.  They’ll be broadcast live on the Internet on stackoverflow.tv, which we will remember to buy before this podcast is published.
• Meth questions! Er, meta questions! First, we tackle “How to deal with a highly voted non-constructive question“. What’s the problem with the question mentioned there? How do we solve this? We decide to call them “pivot questions”. The conversation leads us to another common type of easy question: “bike shed” questions.
• While we’re here, go follow us on Twitter to get the best questions from all of our sites. (It can be a lot to swallow.)
• We experimented with automated twitter feeds and with manually curated twitter feeds, and have found limited success with both. We discuss how twitter feeds (and other types of feeds) work for our company and our sites.

For you people listening at home: We want to take your questions! Go to s.tk/podcastquestions to record your question for us to play and answer on the air. You can also send us a written message… somehow.

SE Podcast #40 - Random Musings (and a surprise guest) [ 59:29 ] Download

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So. We’ve torn through the advent calendar, tossed aside all the wrapping paper, and (hopefully) obsessively screencapped our gravatars wearing various kinds of silly hats. As of last Friday, Winter Bash 2012 is officially over!

This event was awesome. We had a total of 46,710 users participating across 76 sites, and we gave away 108,924 hats total. The most common hat was the And I Feel Fine hat, which 23,171 users earned for activity on December 21st. The least common hat earned was I Do Say, which was obtained by Bohemian, on Stack Overflow, and kalina, on Arqade for posting an epic 30 up-voted questions. Lots and lots of us were able to find all 7 unlockable secret hats, and a few even found an eighth. Well done!

Sadly, all good things must come to an end. We’ve packed up the hats (and archived the JavaScript) until next time. For now, you’ll be able to see the hats you won (and Jin’s excellent artwork) on http://winterba.sh. If you’re curious to see what hats other people earned, check out the leaderboard.

I really loved seeing how you all got creative in making your gravatars work with the hats — some of which were comically large! Below are a very small number of the hats I enjoyed seeing. There were just too many hats I liked; I have tons and tons of screencaps of users wearing hats in fun, funny, cool, and/or interesting ways.

On some sites, even the Community ♦ user got into the spirit of things:

The best surprise (aside from the little blue circle letting me know I’d gotten another hat!) was seeing users I didn’t expect to enjoy hats sporting all sorts of interesting looks. Since Stack Overflow in particular tends to have a stronger “professional” focus, I tend to forget that folks who are passionate about their work get just as passionate about having fun now and again. Seeing some top users from all over the network equipping headgear, well, it caught me off guard and made me smile.

Several of you also found the “easter egg” on the Winter Bash site — holding down Ctrl and collecting all the falling snowflakes revealed a snowy pink unicorn!

Real Data

One of the things I wanted to look into is how a temporary, high-profile badge can alter behaviors. While some users have mentioned that they stuck around more, was this true at large?

The data are not really clear. Sites with a very high hats-to-users ratio saw serious increases in posts created during this time, visits, and general positive responses from traffic. Straw polls of the moderation teams would seem to indicate that general site upkeep (things like flags, edit queues, and other mod-actions) held stable. Anecdotally, the review queues seemed extra empty, though whether that was because fewer folks were around the sites or because everyone really wanted Le Magritte isn’t clear.

I know I consider this event a real success! It’s been a pleasure seeing everyone get excited, wear silly headgear, and just generally loosen up a bit as the year drew to a close.

Special thanks to Stack Exchange developers Emmett and balpha for building this and keeping it running smoothly, to VP of Engineering David Fullerton for coordination, guidance and encouragement, and to the aforementioned Jin for the beautiful design work.

The Future of Hats

I definitely want to try for some things for the next time:

• Hats in chat has been requested before. I’d like to push for this for next year.
• Site-specific hats would be super cool. Some sites unofficially got a hat — Seasoned Advice and Home Improvement — but I’d love to see more sites get their own bespoke hats.
• More hats! Secret hats seemed to get people the most excited — adding more of those to the batch next year strikes me as a very good idea.

If you have suggestions or feedback about Winter Bash, please feel free to answer this post. I’m going to keep an eye on it, and gather ideas and improvements for next year from your responses.

When we first tried out this idea on Arqade, it wasn’t entirely clear this would be well-received elsewhere. But, based on what I’ve seen these past few weeks, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Hats on Stack Exchange.

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Today’s guest is Jeremy Tunnell, who says it’s great to be here. He’s the new Product Manager on the Stack Exchange team. He works out of Nashville but is in New York with us, recording live in the podcast studio!

• Also, on today’s podcast, everyone is going to eat a spoon of cinnamon and ten Saltines. Sam tried to eat a spoonful of cinnamon and did not succeed. The Saltine Challenge: also hard. The Gallon Challenge: also hard.
• Jeremy is the new kid on the block. He started a few weeks ago and is our new resident UX Expert.
• We should have listeners call into the podcast with their questions, like we used to! (This was before Jay’s time.)  Go to s.tk/podcastquestions to submit an mp3 of your question for next week’s podcast.
• Jeremy is not from Texas, but he is from the South. We’re not sure how he got the horse up past security in the lobby.
• Back to Jeremy. He’s been focusing on the perspective of the new user (including making lots of brand new accounts). He’s trying to introduce the non-engineer perspective into our development process. He’s currently focusing on the sign-up process, which is critical for user acquisition.
• Why do we have a homepage URL? In the old days, your name used to link to whatever homepage you put in there. Nobody uses it now, though, so we can get rid of it!
• Jay points out that we have a fundamental difference between our power users and our casual users. Additionally, we have to wrestle with engineers vs. non-engineer types as users on our sites.
• Don’t make people think, or learn new things. (Don’t make me think about how you want me to enter my phone number.)
• Joel got in trouble with his bosses at Juno once upon a time. It had a 29-page wizard to get people to sign up, including a page for what diseases you had, and when your birthday and your kids’ birthdays were, featuring a horrible date picker (18 clicks to choose “August”).
• The answer to all these arguments? Just test it and see what people do. (Good thing we don’t have to fly to Colorado to do usability testing anymore.)
• We have a weird maximum age on Stack Exchange sites, so there are a ton of 89-year-olds on our site, apparently.
• We have heard from a lot of people that our site is impossible to log into. Our site is optimized for programmers. A great example: OpenID! We talk about OpenID and OAuth for… a while.
• Another example of something that’s a good idea for programmers but confuses everyone else is Gravatar. Gravatar is great if you already have an account, but the experience of trying to upload a picture is too many steps if you have to make a new Gravatar account.
• Do our listeners know how much Jeremy looks like Wil Wheaton?  Check out the Stack Exchange Team page to find out
• News from the dev team! We had two outages this week, totally unrelated to each other. One was ten minutes and the other less than 30 minutes. (Nowhere near as bad as Tumblr’s catastrophe last night!) (Our status blog is on tumblr.) One was a boring hardware failure, and the other one is a result of the fact that we’re starting to outgrow our search solution.
• So we’re investigating other options that will make our search even better (and it’s suddenly urgent)! So a side effect of these outages is that our search will get better. We talk about search for a while.
• So if you’re interested in working on that, we’re hiring for our New York office, or remotely!
• If you have questions for us, you can go record your question and send it to us!

That’s all for this week. See you on ChaCha!

SE Podcast #39 - The One with Wil Wheaton [ 52:52 ] Download

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2012 has come and gone, and we have accomplished many incredible things together. Our little corner of the Internet has changed the way people teach and share information with their peers. This has become a place to share the interests you are passionate about — a place to get better what you do, and you do it all with a bit of fun and humor and a chance to show off a bit on occasion.

But the biggest motivation that drives what we do is a sense of purpose — a sense that we are all doing something really important here. Stack Exchange isn’t created from the hard work of one individual. It takes the collective effort of much larger community working together.

That’s why we take this time of year to remember why we are here. This is the time we set aside to give back to the community.

It has been a tradition at Stack Exchange to make a $100 donation to charity on behalf of each community moderator. When the invitations are sent, watching the outpouring of charity selections come racing back in real time is breathtaking. Within hours, hundreds of moderators already selected their charity wishes. That kind of outpouring of support is something we can all feel good about.

So… on behalf of the 304 moderators of Stack Exchange, we will be making the the following donations to charity this holiday season:

• The Humane Society — $2,700
• The Red Cross (Sandy Relief) — $3,600
• Wikimedia Foundation — $6,800
• Electronic Frontier Foundation — $6,900
• Doctors Without Borders — $10,400

And to these projects that we use extensively and helped us build our own network of websites:

• HAProxy — $1,000
• OpenSTV — $1,000
• DotNetOpenAuth — $1,000

So here’s to 2012. Here’s to the moderators who volunteer their time, their passion, and their leadership to keep these sites humming. Here’s to the incredibly talented team at Stack Exchange who keeps the gears running and the lights on. And here’s to you — the communities who have worked so hard to become part of this shared vision. You are truly the best in the world at what you do.

Farewell, 2012. Welcome, 2013!

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