Topic: design

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 bounties. We also show the history and number of bounties you’ve started or participated in on your user page, on the bounties tab.

Upon further reflection, we realized that it can be difficult to tell exactly what a question bounty is for. That is, what is the bounty owner — who may or may not be the question owner — looking for in the answers to this question? What’s the intent of this bounty? How will it be awarded? So we added a choice of bounty reasons that explain why the bounty exists:

Authoritative reference needed
Looking for an answer drawing from credible and/or official sources.

Canonical answer required
The question is widely applicable to a large audience. A detailed canonical answer is required to address all the concerns.

Current answers are outdated
The current answer(s) are out-of-date and require revision given recent changes.

Draw attention
This question has not received enough attention.

Improve details
The current answers do not contain enough detail.

Reward existing answer
One or more of the answers is exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty.

Beyond these standard reasons, which we think are typical and should work for most types of question bounties, you can also enter some optional, additional custom text that describes in more detail what you want from the bounty. Both are displayed at the bottom of the bounty notice to help explain what’s going on, and how you can potentially earn the bounty:

There have also been a few other minor tweaks to bounties:

• To assist forgetful bounty owners, there is a new 24 hour grace period at the end of every bounty. During this grace period, the question will not be featured, but the bounty can still be awarded at any time.
• To discourage overly promotional bounties, if you are starting a bounty on a question you yourself have answered, the minimum rep cost is 100, increased from the standard 50.
• To prevent “infinite” bounty periods, multiple bounties started on the same question by the same user double in cost every time. So if the first bounty is 50 rep, the next will be 100, then 200, then 400, then the maximum.
• The featured tab on the homepage gives priority to larger bounties. The last 24 hours of the bounty period are still ordered purely by time of bounty end, but up until then the larger the bounty, the higher your question will appear on the featured tab.

We liked this idea of explanatory text associated with bounties so much, we extended it to also apply as a general “post notice” to locked questions like this one on Stack Overflow, and we allow moderators to apply (in some rare cases) arbitrary post notices to individual questions and answers, as you can see on Skeptics.

Enjoy these improvements to the bounty system. It’s our hope that more bounties will be used to improve questions and make each Stack Exchange site an even better resource for getting expert answers to your questions — whether you asked them or not!

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 while recording podcast #15 with Michael Natkin of cooking.stackexchange.com, I belatedly realized we weren’t making it easy to discover information about the smart people answering all those questions. Sure, we show the basics (reputation, name, badges) in the default User Card that every post is “signed” with — but that gives you the barest of context into the person answering, or their professional background in the topic.

To rectify that, we now have improved User Cards that expand when you hover over the avatar, displaying location, key links, and an excerpt of the “About Me” field:

So now you can quickly discover a bit more about the human being who wrote that post — without needing to click all the way through to their user page.

On Stack Exchange, Q&A is designed to focus squarely on the content of the questions and answers, not necessarily the person. That said, it is sometimes useful to learn a little but more about the author to provide more context for the post. As one (admittedly extreme) example, off-topic questions are strictly forbidden, but we might be willing to stretch the rules a bit if you’re Alan freaking Kay.

As it turns out, many of our community members are rather interesting people, even outside that particular Q&A topic. Hovering over an avatar lets you easily learn a bit more about your fellow community members … if you want to.

We treat the expanding user card as a bit of a privilege, so you must have 1,000 or more reputation for it to appear. Any user with less than 1k rep will not have a user card hover by definition. And, of course, there has to be a reasonably complete user profile, otherwise there’s nothing to show!

There are some other subtle ways we try to keep this user card hover useful, such as prioritizing any “identity” links like Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Google+, etcetera — and you can override the excerpt for total control of what displays on your expanded User Card. See our meta post for more detail.

This is all completely optional, of course, so to distinguish between the two states, we’ve added a subtle 3D shadow to the avatars that have an expanding user card on hover. So if you’d like to share a bit more about your background with your peers, and provide a bit of additional author context to your questions and answers, don’t hesitate to flesh out your profile!

The badge system exists for two reasons:

1. to teach new users how Stack Exchange works
2. 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 we haven’t had time to talk about yet.

	Visited every section of the FAQ
	Edited first post that was inactive for 6 months
	Edited 100 posts that were inactive for 6 months
	Achieved a flag weight of 500 by reviewing and flagging appropriately
	Achieved a flag weight of 749 by reviewing and flagging appropriately
	Approved or rejected 100 suggested edits
	First approved tag synonym
	First tag wiki edit
	Used the maximum 40 votes in a day
	One post with score of 2 on meta
	10 posts with score of 2 on meta

Badges are supposed to be a little mysterious; you should view them as minor puzzles with obvious hints.

• What activity is this badge referring to?
• How do I perform this activity?
• Why is this activity important and necessary?
• Who should normally perform this activity, and when?

Most of these are fairly self-explanatory, but I believe the flag weight and review sections do warrant some background. Of course there’s the insanely detailed meta faq about flag weight, but the short version is this: flag things that community moderators agree is helpful, and your flag weight will go up.

Your flag weight, if it is something other than the default of 100, will be visible on your user profile under your reputation score.

You can view the status of your flags by clicking the flag weight link. There are two flag dispositions, helpful and declined. Generally, so long as you are flagging in a genuinely useful manner that helps make the site better, most of your flags should be of the former and not the latter.

If you’re looking for posts to flag — or vote, edit, and comment on — I highly recommend using the review link on the site. At the top of every page you’ll see one of two links: either review (from 200 to 9,999 reputation) or tools (from 10,000+ reputation and beyond). Both can get you to the review page.

Click around on the review page and read the explanation on the sidebar to get the gist of it.

Please do bear in mind that flagging is no substitute for the normal editing and voting process. We encourage responsible flagging, but if a question should be closed, or a post downvoted, don’t hesitate to take action yourself. Actions from the broader community as a whole speak much louder than actions from community moderators!

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. With suggested edits, anyone, even an anonymous user, can edit anything — so long as another experienced user reviews and approves their edit.

This leaves many wondering — what’s the point of Community Wiki?

Community Wiki is not for Fun

With suggested edits now in place, you could argue that the removal of reputation from voting is now the only function of community wiki. Unfortunately, this means it is often seen as a magic switch to allow questionable content.

One of the first feature requests I saw on Meta Stack Overflow was Moderator Filtering of Highest Voted Questions, which was deemed necessary because questions like Coolest Server Names show the wrong side of the site. The actual problem-solving nature of sites is too easily buried under the weight of all these “fun” community wiki questions. At one point, “Our top voted post is an actual question!” was a point of pride. That’s … not a positive sign for a Q&A network.

Even when divorced from reputation, votes are hugely important. Something with a lot of votes means “this is what we deem quality content”, and votes are how we differentiate between answers when there is no single definitive answer. Community wiki should never be used as a get out of jail free pass for joke and fun questions. It may succeed in preventing any single individual from gaining reputation for posting a cartoon or joke, but the question will remain on the site. And it will now and forever be one of the top questions by votes, advertised to the world as one of the top rated things on your site.

Is that what you really want?

Community Wiki is not a “Quick Fix”

Community wiki isn’t only abused for “fun” or “getting-to-know-you” stuff, though. Many sites propose using community wiki to allow content that is on-topic and useful, but can be considered borderline or questionable in other ways. Someone notes that a certain class of question has problems, and proposes using community wiki as a quick fix.

If a question is valuable enough that you believe it belongs on the site, chances are you don’t need it to be community wiki! We welcome all contributions which improve the quality of a site and advertise its greatness to the rest of the world. If you allow a certain class of questions, but only under the stipulation that no one can earn reputation from them, you’ve strongly discouraged these sorts of questions. People aren’t going to put in nearly as much effort to ask them.

Instead, strive for quality. If you’re unsure a certain question class belongs on the site, don’t tolerate the worst examples — demand that these questions be awesome. Questions shouldn’t be swept under the rug with community wiki; they should get the same respect and treatment as the rest of your Q&A. If those questions are something you are uncomfortable showing to visitors … they probably don’t belong on your site.

Many things which “need” to be community wiki simply don’t. Sometimes it’s just a matter of understanding the root of a question: “Software to record video games” can be turned into a great question without needing the crutch of community wiki. Or, you may need to break the original question into smaller parts; a rather well-timed Ask Different Meta post explores this very avenue.

I’m relatively new here, but the examples of ‘community wiki’ that I’ve seen so far seem to be actively detrimental to the web site. For example, the ‘What Lion bugs irritate you the most?’ thread takes lots of good questions and answers that could (should?) be individually placed on the main page and effectively hides them in a single thread.

Detrimental indeed. Community wiki abuse includes its ability to mask or devalue important quality content just as often as it involves the presence of low quality content.

Sometimes you have content which is valuable and on-topic, but is perhaps a bit too popular. It runs the risk of overwhelming the rest of your site if it grows untamed. In these circumstances, community wiki can be a way to preserve the value of these posts while stifling their growth. Keep in mind, though, that in using community wiki to stifle growth, you should actually follow through with it — a site should never have more than one community wiki question for every hundred questions. Having too many community wiki questions defeats the entire purpose.

Community Wiki is primarily for Answers

If we haven’t said this enough already, questions rarely, if ever, need community wiki. What about answers? We removed the ability for users to make a question community wiki, but left the ability for users to make an answer wiki.

The intent of community wiki in answers is to help share the burden of solving a question. An incomplete “seed” answer is a stepping stone to a complete solution with help from others; an incomplete question is a hindrance and an obstacle to getting a solution as no one understands the inquiry. It is in answers that the goal of community wiki, for the community, by the community, shows its truest colors.

Yet even in answers, true collaboration is scarce. Most of the time, a single individual can provide a complete answer. There are even times where a question looks like it’ll need a massive effort, but one gallant user steps up to the plate with an impressive and comprehensive answer.

Community Wiki is dead. Long live Community Wiki!

Most of the time, you should be asking yourself “How can I improve this post so that community wiki isn’t needed?” Community wiki is like a cheese knife: it is a specialized tool to be used sparingly.

Community wiki is for that rare gem of a post that needs true community collaboration. That’s when community wiki shines. If your site is teeming with community wiki posts — particularly in questions — you should consider the above points carefully.

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 far, ordered by frequency.

Simple indeed. No explanation, just … activerecord (485).

It became increasingly clear to us that were doing a poor job of educating users about not just which tags to use on a question, but also when to use them. And I believe our old tag completer was a big reason why.

That’s why we went back to the drawing board and built a bigger, better, badder tag completer. One that not only uses a consistent visual tag style throughout, but crucially includes the tag wiki excerpt along with the tag!

It’ll also assist when you’re asking a question on a meta, by helpfully displaying the required tags on a meta question as soon as you enter the tag field.

It handles synonyms much more elegantly, too.

We’re proud of the work the community has put into their tag wikis, and it’s our hope that the new tag completer will better surface all these fantastic tag wikis to help educate users about what the tags mean, and most importantly, when they should be used. A question with correct, accurate tags is a lot more likely to get a good answer.

For this to work, you do need good tag wiki excerpts in place. Fortunately, we made it easy to edit a bunch of tag wikis at once on the redesigned tags page — and here’s our advice on how to write smart, effective tag wiki excerpts:

1. The excerpt is the elevator pitch for the tag. You only have ~500 plain text characters for the excerpt, so don’t feel obligated to cover everything in it! Save that for the 30,000+ character Markdown tag wiki. The excerpt should define the shared quality of questions containing this tag — boiled down to a few short sentences.
2. Avoid generically defining the concept behind a tag, unless it is highly specialized. The “email” tag, for example, does not need to explain what email is. I think we can safely assume most internet users know what email is; there’s no value in a boilerplate explanation of email to anyone.
3. Concentrate on what a tag means to your community. For “email” on Server Fault, mention the server aspects of email including POP3, SMTP, IMAP, and server software. For “email” on Super User, mention desktop email clients and explicitly exclude webmail, as that would be more appropriate for webapps.stackexchange.com.
4. Provide basic guidance on when to use the tag. In other words, what kinds of questions should have this tag? Tags only exist as ways of organizing questions, so if we don’t provide proper guidance on which questions need this tag, they won’t get tagged at all, rendering the tag excerpt moot. Think of it as a sales pitch: in a room full of tags screaming “pick me!”, what would convince a question asker to select your tag?
5. Some tags are common knowledge. Most tags require a bit of explanation in the excerpt, even if it’s only 3 or 4 words. But if the tag is common knowledge — that is, if you walked up to any random person on the street and said the tag word to them, and they would know what you were talking about — then don’t bother explaining the tag at all. Stick to usage of the tag within your community in the excerpt.

Even if you have good tag wikis already, it’s healthy for communities to introspect a bit about their use of tags, and what those tags mean. Periodically asking questions like “who would ever subscribe to this tag, and why?” can reveal a lot about the nature of tagging on your site.