Recent feature changes to Stack Exchange

December 2011

• 2011-12-28: There's a tag-wiki-specific "not helpful... does not follow any of our tag wiki guidelines" suggested-edit rejection reason.

• 2011-12-22: The /reputationpage now shows the reputation earned from suggested edits.

• 2011-12-21: Moderators (and the users themselves) can now see history of past user names (for users that have ever changed their name)

November 2011

• 2011-11-28: The newly redesigned profile pages have been pushed network-wide.

• 2011-11-28: Spoiler text is now hidden in Questions pages and on front page tooltips.

• 2011-11-23: New short link for answers in the form of stackoverflow.com/a/[answer_id]. These may also contain a user ID for tracking purposes, but sharing them does not award publicity badges.

• 2011-11-22: The new-look profiles have been rolled out to Server Fault and Super User, but not the site metas. Also other sites including EL&U, WepApps, Gaming and Ubuntu.

• 2011-11-15: The profile page has been redesigned and the new style deployed to Meta only for testing.

• 2011-11-08: The Reviewer badge has been changed to a silver badge with the requirements increased to 1000 reviews and acting on at least 200.

• 2011-11-07: nofollow removed from links in "reputable" posts.

• 2011-11-07: New bronze badge "Reviewer" for reviewing 300 posts and acting on over 60 of them.

• 2011-11-02: When reviewing a suggested edit, you can now reject it with a custom reason.

October 2011

• 2011-10-27: The review section now lets you mark posts as reviewed. Doing so allows you to directly take actions on these posts (such as voting, flagging, commenting, …), and hides them from the review section.

• 2011-10-18: Stack Exchange URL shortener s.tk launched.

• 2011-10-13: Blogs snippets added to Stack Exchange newsletters.

• 2011-10-11: "Suggestions" filter added to the activity tab in user profiles, showing all the edits that member suggested and their status.

• 2011-10-08: Email notifications overhauled and integrated with the global inbox.

• 2011-10-07: When placing a bounty on question asked by other user, you are getting a notification for new answers on that question as long as the bounty is active.

September 2011

• 2011-09-30: When rejecting an edit you can now choose a pre-defined reason.

• 2011-09-27: "Post Made Community Wiki" now showing the actual reason.

• 2011-09-26: Links to comments on the profile page will now always take you directly to the comment, even if it would usually be hidden (currently only if the comment is on an answer).

• 2011-09-23: Moderators can add a notice to a post that will display at the bottom of the post.

• 2011-09-23: You must be a registered user to ask questions on Stack Overflow. Unregistered users may still answer questions however.

• 2011-09-22: On Stack Overflow, low-reputation users must enter a nominal ratio of non-code characters for each line of code in a question before they can ask it. (This was also discussed during SE Podcast #19.)

• 2011-09-22: Users are now notified of unaccepted answers.

• 2011-09-20: The minimum bounty on a question you have answered is now 100.

• 2011-09-20: Questions with an identical title to an existing question can no longer be submitted.

• 2011-09-20: The featured tab now sorts with a weight that gives a Colbert Bump to higher bounties.

• 2011-09-20: Bounty remarks are now supported.

• 2011-09-20: The badges page now includes filtering by type.

• 2011-09-19: @name can now be autocompleted in comments using the tab key, similar to chat.

• 2011-09-17: Flagging a post for moderator attention, and then casting the final deletion or close vote, no longer earns an increase in flag weight.

• 2011-09-16 Network profiles no longer use ugly guids, but a pretty account id.

• 2011-09-16: Management and promotion of newsletter subscriptions.

• 2011-09-16: Locked posts now include an explanation of why they were locked (example), and can be optionally configured to automatically unlock after a certain amount of time has passed.

• 2011-09-14: Email notifications for individual questions are no longer available. Instead, users can receive email notifications of unread inbox items.

• 2011-09-14: Deleting a post that is the master of a closed duplicate will now provide a warning.

• 2011-09-14: An advanced search option hasnotice:1 has been added to find posts with moderator notices.

• 2011-09-12: The revision diff list now offers a side-by-side diff in addition to the inline diff.

• 2011-09-12 Declined flags will now include a reason that is included in the user's Flagging Summary.

• 2011-09-12: You now have extra delete votes for every 1k above 10k reputation (beta sites may differ), with an upper limit of 30 delete votes per day.

• 2011-09-12: At 5k rep, users now have full access to the suggested edit queue.

• 2011-09-11: The minimum amount of rep that can be spent on a bounty now doubles for each successive bounty on the same question by the same user. In other words, if the first bounty on a question starts at 50 rep, the next bounty on that question has a minimum rep of 100, the next 200, the next 400, the next (max).

• 2011-09-09: LinkedIn removed from sharing options

• 2011-09-06: Users can no longer single-handedly undelete their own posts if they were deleted by vote; they can only vote to undelete like any other user.

• 2011-09-06: The sharing buttons are now shown on the trilogy in addition to the SE 2.0 sites.

• 2011-09-02: Up to 3 concurrent bounties are allowed per user now.

• 2011-09-02: Voting to close as a duplicate now lists questions that were previously used when closing related questions.

August 2011

• 2011-08-27: Avatars now have a pop-up with user info which expands when hovered over. (This was first tested on Meta sites and is now deployed everywhere.)

• 2011-08-24: facebook.stackoverflow.com "mini-site", as the new official developer support channel for all Facebook developers. When using a Facebook account to log in, this also pulls your Facebook profile picture to be used as your avatar, but you can revert that.

• 2011-08-24: New bronze badge "Analytical" for visiting every section of the FAQ.

• 2011-08-22: New gold badge "Marshal" for achieving a flag-weight of 749.

• 2011-08-17: Tools and Review got separate category tabs (on the left) at 10k tools; the /tools link in the top bar remembers the last selection.

• 2011-08-16: The "links" tab on /tools is gone and now those links are inside other pages like "stats", "close", "delete".

• 2011-08-15: Excavator and Archaeologist badges added for editing posts that were inactive for 6 months.

• 2011-08-09: Descriptive error message is now displayed upon image upload failures.

• 2011-08-09: Improved Tag auto-complete to include tag wiki excerpt.

• 2011-08-09: Control-Enter in search box now opens results in a new tab/window.

• 2011-08-08: The search text box now auto-expands to the left when focused, temporarily hiding the top-bar links.

• 2011-08-06: Proofreader badge for having reviewed 100 suggested edits.

• 2011-08-02: In the 10k tools, the delete tab now shows remaining needed vote counts.

• 2011-08-01: Titles that appear to start with a tag now have the tag stripped out.

July 2011

• 2011-07-19: Comments containing multiple @name are blocked now unless they contain a backtick.

• 2011-07-18: Trivial answers containing a link to another question in the network are automatically converted to comments on the question.

• 2011-07-16: Mobile theme for Stack Exchange sites launched. Users can switch back and forth from the mobile theme using the 'mobile' link at the bottom of every page.

• 2011-07-15: Anonymous and low rep (<15) users now see a "give feedback" link where logged in users usually see "add comment". When moused over, this shows "Was this post useful to you [yes] [no]". This is just for testing purposes right now - it does not affect the post's score.

• 2011-07-13: New heuristics blocking posts with no or improper code formatting (only for users with <= 50 reputation).

• 2011-07-08: Inline post editing is now enabled network wide to people with the editing privilege.

• 2011-07-07: It is no longer possible to award a bounty to your own answer.

• 2011-07-07: 10k users can now see the Migrated tab on /tools?tab=migrated, which was previously a ♦ moderator tool.

• 2011-07-07: Synonymizer badge added for First approved tag synonym.

• 2011-07-07: Migrating to another site requires 4 migration votes, instead of a simple 3/5 majority as before. This change applies only to Stack Overflow.

• 2011-07-06: Close- and reopen- votes now age away on a sliding window: if four days elapse without a close or reopen vote, the votes begin aging away. Posts with fewer than 100 views do not expire votes.

• 2011-07-01: In comments between the post owner and only one other person, @lerting the post owner will be removed from the comment text if it is at the beginning of the comment as it is not needed. (The post owner is always notified of comments on their post.) Moreover, @postowner (or an invalid @lert) does no longer block a subsequent @lert; see #8 in How do comment @replies work?

December 2012

• 2012-12-14: CSS of Stack Overflow and Meta Stack Overflow has been updated, mainly "thinning down" text.

• 2012-12-14: "No Action Needed" button has been introduced in First Posts and Late Answers review queues.

• 2012-12-13: Suspending reviewing privileges has been introduced for those who fail multiple review audits in a short time.

November 2012

• 2012-11-30: Vote to close -> offtopic from Stack Overflow adds SharePoint; removes Server Fault.

October 2012

• 2012-10-19: Review actions limits have been changed: after 20 reviews in a given queue, you're done for the day - if you want to continue reviewing, you can switch to a different queue. Limit is doubled for queues with large backlogs.

• 2012-10-18: Migration for questions older than 60 days is now not possible, even by Moderators

• 2012-10-17: Reopen Votes review queue has been introduced to vote whether or not to reopen closed questions.

• 2012-10-16: The number of reviews required to accept/reject suggested edits has been increased to two network wide (versus one before) and three on Stack Overflow (versus two before). Moderators can still cast the final vote like before.

• 2012-10-01 (likely earlier): suspension reason "This account is temporarily suspended for asking programming questions on MSO" introduced.

September 2012

• 2012-09-22: Voting allowed (and encouraged) in First Posts and Late Answers review queues.

• 2012-09-21: New badges added for completing community review tasks. User can earn Custodian (1 review), Reviewer (250 reviews) and Steward (1000 reviews) once for each review queue (Close Posts, First Posts, Late Answers, Suggested Edits and Low Quality Posts). The previous Reviewer badge (for reviewing posts in the old system) will no longer be awarded.

• 2012-09-08: You must be a registered user to ask questions on Programmers Stack Exchange. Unregistered users may still answer questions however.

August 2012

• 2012-08-15: Canned Comment Feedback Dialog for Community Review page.

• 2012-08-13: Review audits are introduced: known cases thrown into review queue as "gotchas" to keep people from just nailing "Looks Good" or "Close" or whatever without reading the posts.

July 2012

• 2012-07-13: The Help Center has been added. It contains pages for many common issues, offering suggestions and a form to email the team as needed. This is the new target of the "contact us" link in the footer, which was previously an email link.

• 2012-07-12: The new Community Review Tasks system is now in beta on the trilogy.

• 2012-07-06: The edit link is now disabled instead of hidden for registered users who cannot edit the post. The tooltip will display a reason such as "Post is locked".

• 2012-07-02: "question eligible for bounty in X" message will be hidden for the question owner only if the question has an accepted answer. (Before this change it was hidden when question got an answer)

June 2012

• 2012-06-08: New badges Caucus and Constituent, for browsing an election page and for voting in an election; announced on the blog.

• 2012-06-05: Vote to close -> offtopic from Stack Overflow adds TeX, DBA; removes Programmers and Webmasters.

May 2012

• 2012-05-21: Notifications tab in the multicollider (next to the inbox).

• 2012-05-18: You can answer your own question at the time of posting by ticking the “Answer your own question” checkbox below the “Post Your Question” button.

• 2012-05-10: When there is a community moderator election it is noted in that site's newsletter.

• 2012-05-05: Keyboard shortcuts (created with <kbd>) on all sites are now rendered like they've always been on Ask Different, with a less boxy layout.

Apr 2012

• 2012-04-30: Suggested edits that change the post's title now have no minimum on the body edit.

• 2012-04-26: Stack Exchange is experimenting with automatically following links and might post comments and add them to a list on the /review tab when they are dead.

• 2012-04-26: New votes tab on user profile, clearly you can only see your votes.
  You can see deletions/undeletions/closures and reopens as well as up/down votes (source).

• 2012-04-20: On Stack Overflow, 50 votes available daily for suggested edits, not 40 and edit queue increased to 200.

• 2012-04-16: The Visit Meta box is replaced by an enhanced Community Bulletin box.

• 2012-04-12: It is now possible to undo comment votes within 60 seconds of casting them if you don't navigate away. An undone vote cannot be recast.

• 2012-04-06: Accounts tab has been removed from user profile page. Top 5 accounts are still listed in the Summary view, header and "view more" link to the Stack Exchange accounts page.

Mar 2012

• 2012-03-30: 'Live updates' now includes new answers and new comments

• 2012-03-26: Migrations can now be rejected: if the question is closed (as OT/NC/NaRQ) at the destination site, it becomes merely closed as off-topic on the source site.

• 2012-03-20: Manual deletion of saved drafts.

• 2012-03-15: When anonymous users visit a question that is closed as duplicate and has no answer, they are automatically redirected to the duplicate.

• 2012-03-15: 'Live updates' implemented on Stack Exchange sites; due to heavy activity, the feature is limited to tags view on Stack Overflow.

• 2012-03-06: The new Stack Exchange beta theme has started to be rolled out across the network.

• 2012-03-05: Questions locked for historical significance no longer show up in question lists and their vote buttons are removed (example).

Feb 2012

• 2012-02-29: When a user is deleted, acceptance votes will be moved to Community user, so that reputation points awarded for having the accepted answer will no longer disappear

• 2012-02-27: The amount of example questions with 10+ votes required to reach the commitment phase has been raised from 10 to 40. (Area 51)

• 2012-02-27: Updates to the homepage are now pushed live via web sockets. Initially deployed on Meta, and gradually being deployed to other sites.

• 2012-02-27: Reputation changes are kept up to date, without the need for a manual recalc. (Sync takes up to 5 minutes on a delete/undelete action.)

• 2012-02-22: Automatic question banning calculation has been changed on Meta to better reflect the idea that downvotes can be much more common on meta, for reasons that aren't necessarily related to quality of the post.

• 2012-02-21: Vote counts now include votes cast on deleted posts.

• 2012-02-15: The "Welcome to <site>..." banner message displayed to new visitors has been removed due to low usage.

• 2012-02-07: New silver badge for editing 50 tag wikis (not counting excerpts) introduced: Research Assistant.

• 2012-02-02: Local metas' tag wikis are now locally editable.

Jan 2012

• 2012-01-30: Comments can now be easily linked to using the permalink on their timestamps.

• 2012-01-30: Suggested edits can now be marked as unhelpful when selecting the "Improve" option, causing the Community user to decline the suggested edit with no reputation bonus to the suggester.

• 2012-01-26: Google+ sharing replaced LinkedIn sharing.

• 2012-01-20: Flag weight was removed from user profiles. Users having flags now see a "helpful flags" count on their own profile linking to the flag audit page, which now contains a breakdown of flag outcomes by flag type (moderator attention, spam, offensive, comment). The Deputy and Marshal badges were modified to require a number of helpful flags (80 and 500, respectively) instead of a specific flag weight.

• 2012-01-20: "very low quality" flags now carry an automatic downvote from the Community user with them, and are dismissed when the post is edited.

• 2012-01-16: The populist badge will no longer be awarded for self-answers. Also note that losing your qualification for a already-earned badge will (usually?) no longer result in your next badge of the same type being withheld.

• 2012-01-10: The Announcer, Booster and Publicist badges can now be earned multiple times and they can also be earned for the same question. The time limit has also been removed. Sharing direct links to answers now also counts towards these badges.

• 2012-01-03: Users asking questions with auto-caught bad titles will now be offered a link to Mark Harrison's post on writing good titles.

June 2011

• 2011-06-26: the old edit summary text is now brought up in some circumstances, including during follow-up edits within the 5 minutes grace period.

• 2011-06-24: Moderators can now see deleted comments.

• 2011-06-23: The auto-award period of bounties has been extended 24 hours past the true end of the bounty.

• 2011-06-21: (Date approximate) Anchored links to the FAQ, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/faq#bounty, now highlight the specific FAQ entry at the top of the page.

• 2011-06-20: New bounty tab on user profiles.

• 2011-06-15: The “subjective and argumentative” close reason has been replaced by “not constructive”.

• 2011-06-14: Suggested edits are now enabled for closed questions.

• 2011-06-10: When adding a new comment to a post with many comments between two users in a short time, a link is provided to create a chat room to continue the conversation.

• 2011-06-10: Questions on a few sites (German, Japanese, Judaism) that appear to be written in a foreign language are excluded from the multicollider, the SE home page, SE 2.0 ads and SE tweets.

• 2011-06-09: In addition to being favorited, tags can now also be ignored from the tag popup.

• 2011-06-07: [tag:...] syntax works in comments, but is styled as a normal link instead of a tag.

• 2011-06-07: Flag counts are now shown in the top bar, and the flag page is redesigned (10k users).

• 2011-06-07: The accounts tab has a button to copy login credentials to all Stack Exchange accounts.

• 2011-06-06: Greetings are removed automatically from questions and answers before they are posted.

• 2011-06-06: A number of magic links are available for use in comments.

May 2011

• 2011-05-31: More substantive edits are favored when 2 edits at the same time clash.

• 2011-05-17: Flagging comments shows a popup with flag reasons, similar to flagging posts.

• 2011-05-16: Similar Questions are now shown when composing a question, based on the question title, body and tags. This is similar to the “Related” questions in the side bar after posting the question.

• 2011-05-16: When a bounty is started by the question owner and the owner accepts an answer during the bounty period, the full bounty will be awarded to that answer unless the owner explicitly gives it to another answer before the bounty expires.

• 2011-05-12: Quality filters are now applied to questions. (Here are two 10K only links.)

• 2011-05-12: Question downvotes are "free" to the downvoter and will not be subject to a -1 rep penalty. Downvotes to answers are unaffected and still "cost" 1 reputation to cast.

• 2011-05-09: Vote counts on profile don't show votes cast on deleted posts anymore.

• 2011-05-09: Vox populi badge added for those who used the new maximum 40 votes in a day.

• 2011-05-09: Tag popup in the Favorite and Ignored tags sections on the homepage sidebar has been removed since the "X" moved inside of the tags themselves.

• 2011-05-08: User profiles now separate vote counts based on post type (question/answer).

• 2011-05-07: Images uploaded to SE sites now have i.stack.imgur.com as their URL domain.

• 2011-05-03: In addition to the 30 general votes users can cast per day, there are now an additional 10 question-only votes.

Apr 2011

• 2011-04-29: Users are limited to posting 70 50 questions over the last 30 days.

• 2011-04-29: New inline Markdown help, shown by default to new users.

• 2011-04-28: Flagging Summary page shows valid/invalid flags count as history. Example

• 2011-04-28: New suspensions might now publicly show a reason.

• 2011-04-27: Some returning visitors from Google now get a welcome back and reminder to vote.

• 2011-04-27: Tag sets were renamed to filters and improved by cleaning up the UI and allowing you to view only the sites that you have an account on and only your favorites.

• 2011-04-27: At 200 rep, a review entry appears in the top menu.

• 2011-04-25: You can now use the is: operator in the search box to specify if you want to search only in questions or only in answers.

• 2011-04-22: You can now delete alternative OpenIDs at your profile.

• 2011-04-19: Flag weight is now visible to all users.

• 2011-04-14: Daily number of close votes on all Stack Exchange sites have been increased from 12 to 24, and 50 on Stack Overflow.

• 2011-04-14: Questions closed as “not a real question” and “off topic” get an automatic downvote (excluding questions that get migrated elsewhere).

• 2011-04-11: Questions with enough answers to push them into CW will have the new answer field replaced by an "Answer This Question" button, which asks the user to read through the existing answers first to make sure the new answer isn't a duplicate.

• 2011-04-10: Migrated questions now show [migrated] instead of [closed].

• 2011-04-09: New users (<100 reputation) can no longer answer their own question within 8 hours.

• 2011-04-08: Votes that were undone (revoked within the undo window) are no longer locked in; one can now come back later to cast a new up/down vote.

• 2011-04-08: New answerers (<100 reputation) get dynamic help when focusing the answer box.

• 2011-04-08: The aggregate stackexchange.com profile has improvements from the course of several days. Details of its current capabilities are in the blog.

• 2011-04-07: Posts deleted by a moderator now include a link to the FAQ, and can no longer be undeleted by a non-moderator.

• 2011-04-04: The 404 page shows more specific error messages.

• 2011-04-04: The aggregate stackexchange.com profile is now accessible from any of your user profiles.

• 2011-04-04: Question up-vote rules now sync to meta and can only earn +5 instead of +10.

• 2011-04-03: User's flair now got a separate tab on owner's profile.

• 2011-04-01: The possibility to see downvotes exercised by other users in the redesigned reputation tab of their user profile has been removed again.

Mar 2011

• 2011-03-30: When saving a post that was meanwhile edited by someone else, a warning is shown.

• 2011-03-29: Clicking your flag weight (in your profile) now brings you to a summary of your flag history. See also: How to read the flagging summary?

• 2011-03-29: Clicking the link button on posts now creates a popup from which the link can be copied, instead of being the link itself, after feedback on UI.SE.

• 2011-03-29: searching Markdown source for URLs supported again, like by using url:"http://blog.stackoverflow.com/*".

• 2011-03-25: The accounts tab on a user profile has been redesigned and now pulls the view from stackexchange.com. Accounts are now sorted by reputation in descending order.

• 2011-03-23: If you flag a question as "does not belong" while you still have usable close votes, the flag will instead be converted into a vote to close.

• 2011-03-21: The 6 character minimum length for suggested edits is a bit harder to fool.

• 2011-03-16: Moderators can now remove community wiki status from a post.

• 2011-03-11: The envelope in the header next your display name linking to recent activity has been changed into a dropdown menu that opens a popup overlay with information and links.

• 2011-03-11: The tags page has been redesigned.

• 2011-03-10: The flag weight can now go up to 750, with sub-linear growth beyond 500.

• 2011-03-10: Auto-deletion of low score, zero answers questions has been extended a bit.

• 2011-03-10: Micro-refinement to inbox, you are now notified if post author answers your comment, even if they forget the @, if you are the only person who has commented so far.

• 2011-03-10: The user profile page has been reworked. The reputation tab has been reworked, and some tabs have been separated to the top of the page.

• 2011-03-09: There is a new "responses" tab in your user profile that lists activity by others on your content.

• 2011-03-07: You can now manually specify the language used in code snippets that will be passed to Prettify after saving the post.

• 2011-03-01: The users page has been redesigned and now hosts user leagues.

• 2011-03-01: When browsing with a mobile device, you get a rudimentary, "slimmed down, minimalistic" CSS theme. This overrides per-site themes.

Feb 2011

• 2011-02-25: The log out link can now be found by going to your user page.

• 2011-02-25: Automatic titles of internal links are now also shown in the preview.

• 2011-02-22: Requirements for achieving the Strunk & White and Copy Editor badges have changed. Now it only counts how many revisions are made, not individual title or body changes. Each requires 80 and 500 revisions respectively.

• 2011-02-22: Outspoken badge introduced.

• 2011-02-22: Users can now see their own flag weight on their profile page when it is sufficiently high or low. This value is also visible to moderators.

• 2011-02-21: You can now embed ads for Area 51 proposals to help support and promote proposals and beta sites.

• 2011-02-21: A user's flag weight is now considered in adjusting the number of moderator flags a user gets each day. The details can be found here.

• 2011-02-20: Marking inline code with backticks ` now works almost the same in comments as in questions and answers, and bold & italic is now also possible in comments.

• 2011-02-18: ANY active mod flag suppresses items from /review, prior to this only YOUR flags were suppressed for YOU. (reference)

• 2011-02-17: /review pages now present posts in random order, to "get more eyeballs on more posts".

• 2011-02-11: Stack Exchange API 1.1, and improved App Gallery.

• 2011-02-10: Vote to delete answers implemented and available to 20K users. Answer must be -1 or lower and needs 3 votes. Vote to delete questions not time limited for 20K users. Again 3 votes required.

• 2011-02-09: Migration now does tag checks. During migration, tags will be checked (and replaced if found) for tag synonyms on the destination site. Tags that do not exist on the destination site will be stripped from the question. If the previous steps leave a question with no remaining tags, it will be closed as off-topic on the original site and not migrated, unless it had only one tag that also is a "global tag" on the destination site (e.g. latex questions can be migrated to TeX.se and will be untagged).

• 2011-02-09: Flagging for moderator attention now counts for the Citizen Patrol badge. This change applies retroactively.

• 2011-02-09: Privilege changes: Create tags has been raised from 150 to 300. Retag has been raised from 200 to 500. A new 5k privilege to approve or reject tag wiki edits has been added. A new 15k privilege to protect a question has been added. The question must be older than a day. You can also un-protect a question you protected, but not one that has been protected by someone else. The requirements for editing a tag wiki have been simplified to a 20k rep privilege.

• 2011-02-08: The Stack Exchange Data Explorer now allows you to view and download query execution plans.

• 2011-02-07: The Markdown preview area now renders embedded tags (the kind created with[tag:tags] syntax).

• 2011-02-06: The "all sites" tab in the global inbox is now sorted by your reputation, if above 200.

• 2011-02-02: Moderators can now send private messages to users, through the website. The addressees will see a top-bar notification, and can reply to the moderators.

• 2011-02-02: Comments get an inline drop-down mini-help.

• 2011-02-02: The queue of suggested edits is now visible for 10k users.

• 2011-02-02: When a suggested edit is approved, the user who suggested it gets +2 reputation.

Jan 2011

• 2011-01-30: After testing and tweaking, low reputation users can now suggest edits, to be approved by peer review. Edits suggested by unregistered users show as made by Community. People who suggest edits can earn up to 1000 reputation, 2 for each approved edit.

• 2011-01-27: Area 51 gets an updated design, proposal categories, and a discussion zone. A51 posts are now oneboxed in chat.

• 2011-01-27: Stack Exchange now uses Lucene instead of SQL Fulltext for search, related questions, and the 'similar questions' in Ask a Question. Option infavorites is no longer supported, some search keys like intitle have changed names, and a new option body is introduced. See the help on the /search pages.

• 2011-01-21: The three-character requirement for comment @replies has been relaxed for the first word. Like @Jo will now notify Jo Miller, but not John.

• 2011-01-20: The main list of rooms in chat now displays the global inbox (AKA StackExchange™ MultiCollider SuperDropdown™).

• 2011-01-18: Sort option "oldest" is back, replacing "newest."

• 2011-01-14: Tag pop-ups now lists "Followers" which is equal to the number of people who have favorited (marked as interesting) the tag and the number of email subscribers. Subscribing to RSS is not tracked.

• 2011-01-13: Flag dialog improved. Its "flag for moderator attention" option now provides several default reasons, where appropriate: "not an answer", "low quality" and "should be CW". It allows for longer messages to a moderator. The daily maximum number of flags has been increased. And if a particular user keeps moderator flagging for reasons that are considered invalid, their flag weight decreases. And for those users who continually flag reliably, their flag weight increases.

• 2011-01-11: Twitter question feeds to publish the most interesting questions on each Stack Exchange site (but not the SOFU trilogy) every three hours. Like: twitter.com/StackProgrammer.

• 2011-01-11: Authors can now only delete their question if it has zero answers, or only one answer with zero score. In all other cases, voting or flagging is required.

• 2011-01-08: The "flags" tab in 10k tools was improved; it now shows comment flags in addition to spam/offensive flags, and lets users display the entire post and add their own flag directly from the flags tab. It also preserves the other mod tool tabs.

• 2011-01-08: When hovering over any tag (like this one: stackoverflow) a pop-up will appear. From this you can subscribe to email notifications, add the tag to your RSS reader and view the tag wiki excerpt. Where no tag wiki is available an invitation to create the tag wiki appears. The pop-up also includes links to the FAQ, Info & Top Users pages for the tag.

• 2011-01-07: Chat "whitelists" no longer allow specified users to talk regardless of their rep. Users with less than 20 rep now get only four hours of chat time before being locked out.

• 2011-01-07: Moderators can now convert answers into comments.

• 2011-01-07: The vote-to-close panel now has a more prominent close button (for closing the panel itself, not for voting).

• 2011-01-06: New "faq" tab added to the /questions page, displacing the "hot" tab (but not removing "hot" functionality).

• 2011-01-06: Comments now support inserting links containing parentheses e.g. [foo](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms535874(VS.85).aspx)

• 2011-01-03: Page footers now indicate when a post has been made to the SO blog.

Dec 2010

• 2010-12-31: Questions migrated to another site now redirect clicks to the other site instead of staying on the current site.

• 2010-12-28: Pagination and filtering of user activity now goes back all the way to the first activity.

• 2010-12-26: After migration, question owners get a header message with migration details.

• 2010-12-18: Label for code-button in WMD has changed from into .

• 2010-12-18: Users can no longer enter titles that end with [closed].

• 2010-12-17: Favorite tag now inferred based on questions that you have previously visited. Setting an interesting or ignored tag preference disables this feature.

• 2010-12-16: programmers.stackexchange.com is out of beta.

• 2010-12-16: Tag sets now support emailing you as new questions arrive in your tag set.

• 2010-12-16: new /review page on all sites (eg. Stack Overflow, Mathematics) for tracking potential problem posts from new users. This uses some heuristics for detecting a bad answer.

• 2010-12-12: To make the code highlighting work better, it now uses the question tags to guess what language is used in both the question and its answers. When no guess can be made, or on sites on which highlighting makes little sense (Super User, photo.stackexchange.com, ...) no highlighting will be used.

• 2010-12-12: The Stack Exchange Data Explorer has moved to data.stackexchange.com.

• 2010-12-11: New badges for posting in Meta sites: Quorum (bronze) for one post with score of 2 on meta, and Convention (silver) for 10 posts with score of 2 on meta.

• 2010-12-10: User profiles now display the user's tag statistics (number of questions asked and answers given, along with total question score and total answer score) for each tag on the stats tab. Tooltip gives full details.

• 2010-12-09: Page titles are now (conditionally) prefixed with the most important tag, for better SEO and to combat scrapers.

• 2010-12-08: Close votes on the tools > close tab are now split according to close reason (exact duplicate, off topic, noise or pointless, too localized, etc.)

• 2010-12-08: Off topic migration dialog now links to target site faq rather than site itself.

• 2010-12-08: Comments are no longer pre-expanded after you've entered a single comment, you must re-click "add comment" each time.

• 2010-12-08: "Self-instigated rep recalc" implemented, though well-hidden.

• 2010-12-05: Sort option "oldest" for answers replaced by "active", to easily see what has changed.

• 2010-12-02: Chat now displays a new messages icon next to the "Other rooms you're in" list when users receive replies in other rooms.

• 2010-12-02: Spoiler text is now supported.

• 2010-12-02: Talkative bronze badge for chat users.

Nov 2010

• 2010-11-24: Mouseover of chat messages now highlights any replies to that message.

• 2010-11-13: The "activity" tab of the user profile now gives the option to dynamically show the content of recently posted answers.

• 2010-11-09: Questions are now sorted by "amount of interest" on the homepage rather than time of last activity. (Stack Overflow only.)

• 2010-11-08: The frequency of the notification envelope lighting up has been toned down in favor of the global inbox.

• 2010-11-07: Behavior of [tag:tags] on meta sites updated to refer to the parent site by default; new syntax introduced for a meta-site's own tags (source).

• 2010-11-07: Support for the <kbd> tag re-enabled on Meta Stack Overflow.

• 2010-11-05: Posting links to the very same site now automatically shows the title. So, just insert http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/59445/whatever. to become Recent feature changes to Stack Exchange. The title is not shown in the preview, but inserted when the post is created or edited. The title is not updated when it changes, unless the post is edited. It does not work in comments, nor for links to other SOFU sites. Trailing punctuation marks such as a comma, dot or question mark (without URL parameters) to get a readable sentence work just fine.

• 2010-11-05: Posting tags inside questions and answers now works. Example: instead of writing [`[tags]`](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/tags) to display [tags], users can now write [tag:tags] to display tags.

• 2010-11-03: Official introduction of tag sets, including wildcard support.

• 2010-11-02: Revival badge introduced.

• 2010-11-02: Threshold for Pundit badge changed from "10 comments scoring 10+" to "10 comments scoring 5+".

Oct 2010

• 2010-10-30: Consecutive-days-tracking calendar added to non-public user profiles.

• 2010-10-19: Tweak thresholds for Announcer, Booster, and Publicist badges.

• 2010-10-19: Suffrage and Sportsmanship badges introduced.

• 2010-10-16: The reputation score on top of each page and on the user page links to the /privileges page (click the numbers).

• 2010-10-14: Close reason for "migrate to other site" becomes a sub-option for Off-topic.

• 2010-10-14: Questions can no longer be turned community wiki by non-moderators.

• 2010-10-13: Bounty events are now added to revision history.

• 2010-10-01: A "you have gained power" page has been created. It was announced in chat.

• 2010-10-01: The "Tag Statistics" page link has moved, to stackoverflow.com/tags/<tag>/topusers.

• 2010-10-01: Automatically-saving drafts for answers.

Sep 2010

• 2010-09-29: New users (<10 rep) get a mandatory advice page when they want to ask a question. (Stack Overflow only.)

• 2010-09-22: Image-based flair now available.

• 2010-09-14: To ensure that @name replies work, and to not expose part of the OpenID identifier, user names are no longer defaulted to the OpenID name, but to userxxx.

• 2010-09-07: Bronze tag badges (for earning 100 non-CW upvotes in a tag) introduced. The Announcer, Booster and Publicist badges (for sharing links to questions, which can be tracked now) introduced.

• 2010-09-06: Hitting Enter now submits comments.

• 2010-09-06: The title and tags field of the Ask Question page can be pre-populated by specifying the title and/or tags query parameters, like /questions/ask?title=Some+title&tags=tag1+tag2

• 2010-09-01: New badge, Tag Editor (for first Tag Wiki edit) introduced.

Aug 2010

• 2010-08-24: Support for shorter URLs, like stackoverflow.com/q/1732348.

• 2010-08-13: An image-upload capability has been added, accessible through the image option in the toolbar.

• 2010-08-10: Questions from IP addresses or accounts with a history of extremely poor questions are no longer being accepted. Votes on questions are taken into account, and this yields a permanent IP ban, showing "Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account".

• 2010-08-06: subjective (and other meta-tags) are now banned.

• 2010-08-03: Searching within favorites is now included in advanced search.

Jul 2010

• 2010-07-22: "Info" tab of tags, including a tag wiki and a tag synonym proposal system implemented.

• 2010-07-17: New user preference: I don't want notifications of activity on questions I've favorited (to disable the notification that was introduced 2010-05-31).

• 2010-07-09: New badges for bounties (Promoter, Benefactor, Investor, Altruist) and a gold-level editor badge (Copy Editor) introduced. Additionally, the origins of badges are now recorded, and visible through clicking on a badge on the Badges page or a user's profile.

• 2010-07-09: Bounty award tooltips now display the number of bounties awarded and who awarded them.

Jun 2010

• 2010-06-23: Using the browser's Back button towards the user page, now scrolls that page back to where it was.

• 2010-06-22: Your profile now tracks how many days you have visited the site, and how many consecutive days. This is visible only to yourself and to diamond mods. No more worrying about whether you've missed a day!

• 2010-06-21: Timeline view for revision history introduced. It has since been rolled out system-wide. (date is approximate)

• 2010-06-19: Complete overhaul of the bounty system. Any user with sufficient reputation can start a bounty on any question. A question may have multiple bounties, though only one active bounty is allowed at any given time. Bounty awards are no longer tied to accepted answer in any way. But the system no longer tosses in +50 bonus reputation to a bounty. (More rules.)

• 2010-06-13: SEDE, Stack Exchange Data Explorer, which for SO also "can be used as a permanently linkable tool for teaching general SQL and relational database concepts — we can be our own Northwind or Pubs database, when answering questions tagged [sql]". (Since December 2010, its URL is data.stackexchange.com.)

• 2010-06-11: User profile is Markdown enabled.

• 2010-06-09: Merged questions are no longer utterly annihilated. A stub is left, just like with closing, and the revision list for the target question keeps better details on merges.

• 2010-06-07: Protected question feature has been added so that 1 rep users can't post/spam on questions with a high search engine ranking.

• 2010-06-05: Reset post score to 0 on migration, if the score is negative. Automatic 301 Moved Permanently redirects for migrated, deleted questions, for users with < 10k reputation. Add noredirect=1 to avoid this.

• 2010-06-04: Signatures and taglines are officially discouraged in the /faqs.

• 2010-06-03: Shadows in popups. New mechanism for displaying and selecting questions when voting to close as a duplicate. Keyboard Esc can be used to close the windows.

• 2010-06-02: The Super User FAQ now explicitly prohibits shopping or buying recommendations.

• 2010-06-01: Area comes out of private beta.

May 2010

• 2010-05-31: Notification (experimental) of activity in your favorite questions.

• 2010-05-30: Implemented script that automatically deletes tags six months after they're created if they've only been used once; if necessary, this adds untagged.

• 2010-05-25: Stricter rules for deleting closed questions.

• 2010-05-22: New generalist badge.

• 2010-05-20: To ensure @reply comments work, new usernames must be at least 3 characters.

• 2010-05-20: New stackapps.com and Stack Exchange API public beta.

• 2010-05-19: Automatic account association between the trilogy sites.

• 2010-05-15: A FAQ on the Meta homepage. (Actually a dummy ad.)

• 2010-05-14: Bugs and requests tabs on the homepage/Top Questions of Meta. (Which you could also do manually on other pages.)

• 2010-05-10: Replying to @françois and @jørn can now also be done using @francois and @jorn.

• 2010-05-09: Reputation report improved, now you can check rep-cap status from purely upvotes (reached) and upvotes + accepts (exceeded). Note that bounties are not included on any of that. And Epic/Legendary badges calculation based on exceeded.

• 2010-05-08: Search now supports inquestion:this to limit the search to the current question (using the referrer as sent by your browser).

• 2010-05-08: User profile character limit is now 3,000 characters (up from 2,000 characters).

• 2010-05-07: @reply to editors of a post even if they haven't commented.

• 2010-05-07: For new users, unlimited internal linking allowed (within the trilogy).

• 2010-05-07: "Noise or pointless" added as the Meta equivalent of the "not a real question" close reason.

• 2010-05-05: Option to "log out everywhere", if you are logged in through multiple computers, and would like to log out from everywhere at once.

• 2010-05-01: Search now supports +apples +oranges to enforce including words in the results, and inquestion:48105 to limit results to some question.

Apr 2010

• 2010-04-30: The vote-undo locked text was changed into a more specific "You last voted on this question / Mar 28 at 7:55 / Your vote is now locked in / unless this question is edited", hence also allowing you to see when you voted if your memory fails you.

• 2010-04-25: A new "Linked" posts column on the right, above the existing "Related" posts. It's limited to 50 links, and ordered to put the "best" related links at the top (score, # answers, # views, answer scores).

• 2010-04-01: Inline links in comments, [the Markdown way](http://example.com).

Mar 2010

• 2010-03-30: Auto-comments when voting to close as duplicate, also auto-deleted if the question indeed gets closed and the comment still starts with "possible duplicate of".

• 2010-03-27: Forced to wait before accepting an answer.

• 2010-03-22: Bounties can no longer be awarded immediately, but only after one day.

• 2010-03-20: Personal reputation report.

• 2010-03-19: New reputation rules.

Feb 2010

• 2010-02-08: Despite earlier drastic reductions of the vote-undo window in August 2009, that vote-undo window has been relaxed to 5 minutes.

• 2010-02-03: Direct links to last activity, which could be an edit of an existing post.

Jan 2010

• 2010-01-29: Timeline Question View (like this).

• 2010-01-16: Comment formatting and replies in New, Improved Comments with @reply. See also the FAQ: How do comment replies work?

Oct/Nov/Dec 2009

• 2009-12-27: Edit your own comments, within a 5 minute window, yielding the little pencil icon: .

• 2009-11-30: Show up/down vote totals when clicking the vote count: Need a minimum number of reputation points to see this (currently 1,000, though it could vary from site to site).

• 2009-10-02: Cut off internal links in comments show the question title (actually: the text after the question number in the URL, without the dashes) in the hover text.