Two weeks ago, we announced the public launch of Stack Overflow in Portuguese, our first-ever non-English Stack Overflow community. Which raises one very obvious question:

Have we lost our minds?

Wasn’t the whole point of Stack Overflow to aggregate as much developer knowledge as possible in one place? To get all the potential solutions together, and provide one canonical set of answers?

We are aware that, “Let’s all try speaking speaking different languages!” hasn’t always worked out for the best.

Yup. When we set out to “collectively increase the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world,” a big part of the plan was de-fragmenting information previously spread across myriad books, sites, and your brains. It’s why we mark things as duplicates – we want all the precious gems of knowledge stored in the same cave of wonders.

So know this: we are at least as worried about fragmentation as you are. And we have a plan:

Eventually, all of you are going to have to learn Portuguese.

Okay, not really. But, given that one of our core goals was knowledge aggregation, it does seem just a little bit crazypants to start launching sites in new languages, assuming that one very important fact is true:

Assumption: All of the serious developers in the world are highly proficient in English.

Which… actually sounds plausible. But it’s wrong.

1. Not every developer in the world speaks English. Just reading the comments from our announcement, you’ll see multiple readers sharing that they or their colleagues (and one dad) couldn’t participate on SO due to language constraints. But data beat anecdotes. We don’t have recent numbers for Brazil and Portugal, but we do for China, and they illustrate the same point:
   • 10% of the world’s programmers are in China
   • 1.4% of our visits come from China
   • Only 4.8% of our visits come from China, Japan and Korea combined

   So, if the data tell us that we’re getting roughly 80% less activity from Asia than we should in the absence of language constraints, why does it feel so obvious that all serious programmers speak English?  This may help:

   Quick – name any famous developer who doesn’t write well in English.

   I couldn’t.  I can name over a dozen famous English-speaking coders. But even if you frequent all the hacker sites and conferences, how many devs have you met who aren’t solid in English? Roughly none, right?

   There’s just one problem. Try this:

   Without Googling, name any famous developer from Japan. Or China. Or Russia.

   Again, I couldn’t. Well, I came up with Shigeru Miyamoto. But he’s apparently a designer. I couldn’t name even one. Not like I can name Carmack or Stallman, or Hopper, or even “DHH.” (Does DHH have an actual name? I personally imagine him as a very handsome, talented, fast-driving set of initials. But I digress.)

   Is it plausible that there aren’t any devs good enough to be famous from those countries? Nope. Here’s what’s happening:

   It’s easy to assume that there aren’t any devs who can’t speak English because I never see any. But I never see any because I’m hanging around places where devs go to talk to each other in English.

   The startling truth is this:

   On the internet, If you don’t speak English, you’re completely invisible to me.

   I also assumed that since developers have to learn English-like syntax, they must speak English. Which is a bit like assuming that because I can order Uni, Hamachi, and Aji by their Japanese names, I could probably toss back some sake with Morimoto and discuss knife techniques in Japanese. Even when programming languages use words like “if” or “function,” they’re just terms to memorize, and don’t always even mean the same thing in English that they do in programming.

2. It’s almost impossible to feel like part of a community if you’re not highly proficient in the language. Even non-native speakers who are fluent enough to read posts in their second or third languages often aren’t comfortable enough to write in them.
   

   I imagine myself at a professional meetup where everyone is speaking French (which I studied through college). How many jokes would I tell? How many would I even understand? Sure, I can function, and understand all the words, but I don’t feel like I belong to the group.

   Don’t get me wrong – some of our best users aren’t native English speakers, but they’re in that rare group who have achieved a far higher mastery of a language than their peers. When I hear,

   “Well, I didn’t need a site like this – English is my third language, and I’m in the top 1% on Stack Overflow!”

   I think:

   “Yes, that makes sense. You are insanely good at two difficult, language-based things. Most people will find both of them to be a lot more challenging than you did.”

   The truth is, by requiring fluency in English, we’re shutting out of a lot of developers who may know enough English to read it but not enough to feel comfortable participating.

3. Requiring that all aspiring devs “just go learn English” first isn’t who we want to be.
   

   No child should be denied their chance to revolutionize tomorrow’s input technologies.

   Even if I believed that every programmer must eventually master English, it still wouldn’t make any sense to make them do it first. I believe that everyone – everyone – who can really fall in love with programming should get a chance to. So pre-filtering for the ones willing to learn a foreign freaking language before they first sit down with a code editor to see if it lights some spark in them just feels wrong.Think of the children. The children!! Okay, last quiz, just for the native English speakers:

   How old were you when you first realized you could type things on a keyboard and control machines? Great. Now, at that age, were you proficient enough in another language to have learned to code without any English?

   When I tell someone I work at Stack Exchange, my absolute favorite response is:

   “I basically learned to code from posts I found on Stack Overflow”

   We want that for every young programmer. Not just the ones lucky enough to be born somewhere that English gets taught in grammar school.

Okay, that all makes some sense. But why Portuguese?

To be clear, we still don’t think there needs to be a Stack Overflow in every language. We do want as much centralization as possible, and we know that devs who have mastered English will mostly keep going to the English site, since it has the most critical mass. Just like we want them to. So, you won’t need to learn new languages to find good answers – we expect almost every question asked on the Portuguese site to also be asked (and answered) on the English site.

We’re really only considering launching sites in languages that:

• Have large, strong communities of high-talent developers, where
• A meaningful percent of them aren’t comfortable enough to participate in an English-only community

That probably limits the list of potential candidates to Mandarin, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and Spanish. From there, Portuguese was a no-brainer. The developer community in Brazil is awesome, and growing fast. And we wanted to start with a language with a similar alphabet, to minimize the localization work.

And it’s worth a shot. We’ve learned that it’s easier to just watch the future than to try to predict it. So we’re big on just trying stuff out (assuming it can’t break our other stuff). And we’re huge on getting stuff crazy-wrong, refusing to admit it, and instead doubling down on our wrong-minded idea, while nodding crazily er… admitting we made a mistake, and reversing course. So, given the number of user requests, we figured, “why not give it a it a try?” We’re committed to supporting one or two languages and seeing how they develop before we push any further.

And so far, it’s an incredible success. Despite an audience limited to portuguese-speaking devs, the site’s activity in its first week was higher than all but 4 out of 120 sites we’ve launched to date, including the original trilogy.

More importantly, people who couldn’t ask questions are asking them, and getting great answers. When in doubt, we want to err on the side of helping more people. If just one little girl in Brazil sticks with programming because an answer on this site helped her finish her first project, well… that’s not good enough!  I want to help thousands of them. And the boys, too.

Still, it’s a good start.

If you can’t read the rest of this post, it’s because I’m not talking to you. Which is a little weird, since I can’t even read this without help from our Brazilian Community Manager, Gabe, who’s been kind enough to help me write this in Portuguese.

Depois de semanas em beta privado, nós temos o prazer de anunciar que hoje vai ao ar o nosso primeiro Stack Overflow internacional. E não se trata de um clone em português do site original, mas sim de uma comunidade completamente nova. Uma comunidade que vai poder decidir como ela quer ser, e como vai poder ajudar os desenvolvedores de língua portuguesa.

Tá esperando o que pra criar sua conta?

Sempre quisemos ajudar o máximo possível de pessoas

Quando lançamos o StackOverflow.com (em inglês), a ideia era ter um lugar onde todos os programadores pudessem resolver problemas juntos.

Queríamos um lugar onde desenvolvedores pudessem compartilhar seu conhecimento, num formato melhor do que os fóruns tradicionais. Queríamos que a melhor resposta tivesse destaque e que fosse fácil encontrá-la, tanto para quem perguntou quanto para alguém que pesquisasse sobre o mesmo assunto no futuro.

Construímos um lugar onde a comunidade pode editar e melhorar os posts, votar na melhor solução e trabalhar em conjunto para chegar na melhor resposta. Nosso objetivo era dar à toda comunidade as ferramentas certas e o poder de colaborar e ajudar uns aos outros.

E deu certo.

O Stack Overflow em Inglês tem hoje mais de 6,5 milhões de perguntas, e mais 8 mil delas são criadas todos os dias. Praticamente todas recebem uma resposta correta, que vem logo abaixo da pergunta.

E é a comunidade quem faz tudo isso acontecer. O conteúdo, a edição e até a moderação é feita pelos próprios usuários. Gratuitamente. Porque eles querem ajudar uns aos outros. Ou mostrar uma solução elegante. Ou retribuir a ajuda que receberam.

Mas é preciso saber falar inglês.

Nós não achávamos que o site em uma só língua seria um problema, afinal a maior parte dos programadores fala inglês, né? As próprias linguagens de programação são em inglês, não é mesmo? Mas nos esquecemos de algo muito importante:

Não estávamos escrevendo um manual técnico. Estávamos construindo uma comunidade.

Demorou um tempo, mas nós finalmente percebemos o que muitos de vocês já sabiam. É muito difícil fazer parte de uma comunidade que, literalmente, não fala sua língua.

Hoje o dia é dos programadores de língua portuguesa!

Agora vocês tem um lugar só seu, para construir do seu jeito. A melhor parte de participar de um site novo é que há um mundo de possibilidades pela frente:

Se você é jovem ainda, amanhã velho será… Então aproveite!

As perguntas básicas – aquelas que um dia atormentaram todo programador – ainda não foram feitas. Você pode escrever a pergunta ou resposta definitiva, que vai ajudar dezenas de milhares de programadores no futuro. (Ah, e não se preocupe se a sua pergunta já está no site em inglês. Vocês vão construir um site justamente para que os desenvolvedores que falam português não precisem mais recorrer ao inglês para aprender coisas novas!)

Você pode ser o que quiser quando crescer.

Apesar do site ser dedicado à problemas de programação, você pode decidir que sua comunidade realmente precisa, assim como aconteceu com o Stack Overflow. Durante o começo do site, sejam mais liberais quanto a perguntas de recomendação de ferramentas ou bibliotecas, perguntas relevantes à administração de sistemas ou outras áreas de TI.

Por enquanto, se tem a ver com programação, pergunte à vontade.

Por que começar com português?

[Nota do tradutor: Porque português é a melhor língua, o Brasil é o melhor país e o Jay não consegue ler o que a gente escreve ;)]

Queríamos começar com uma comunidade que atendesse a dois requisitos:

• Um grande número de desenvolvedores talentosos, em que
• Grande parte deles se sentisse muito mais confortável em falar sua própria língua do que o inglês

Então a escolha foi muito simples. O Brasil conta com uma das maiores e mais fortes comunidades de programação do mundo, e isso sem contar Portugal, Moçambique, Angola e outros países menores que acrescentam ainda mais desenvolvedores talentos a esse grupo.

Esse site é de todos vocês. Vamos construí-lo juntos!

Crie sua conta. Ou faça o tour (e ganhe sua primeira medalha!)

Stack Overflow officially launched on September 15, 2008. In five short years, you’ve answered over 5 million questions on more than 100 sites, and helped hundreds of millions of people find the answers they needed. Today, we want to celebrate how, together, we changed one small corner of the Internet for the better.

We want to hear your stories about how someone on Stack Exchange helped you.

“Then, a Miracle Occurs”

Before it went into beta, stackoverflow.com had a comic on the landing page that came to symbolize what we were setting out to do:

We knew what our goal was, and we had some idea how to start, but the entire thing working was predicated on that middle step: “then a miracle occurs”. The original vision statement was ambitious:

It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. (from Introducing Stack Overflow, emphasis added)

It was a gamble: would people really take time out of their busy lives to answer other people’s questions, for nothing more than fake internet points and bragging rights?

It turns out that people will do anything for fake internet points.

Just kidding. At best, the points, and the gamification, and the focused structure of the site did little more than encourage people to keep doing what they were already doing. People came because they wanted to help other people, because they needed to learn something new, or because they wanted to show off the clever way they’d solved a problem.

Which was lucky for us.  Because here’s the crazy secret about gamification:  In the history of the world, gamification has never gotten a single person do anything they didn’t already basically like to do.

In the midst of everyone’s individual reason for coming, somewhere among the hundreds, and then thousands of people who showed up to answer each other’s questions and hammer out how the site should actually work, the miracle actually occurred.

An incredible number of people jumped at the chance to help a stranger

So far, you’ve provided helpful answers to over five million questions. Those answers are seen by forty-four million people looking for help each month.

To put those numbers in perspective:

• That’s more people helped each month than visit the New York Times, Bank of America, or Apple.com.
• If the people helped each month were a US state, it’d be bigger than California and almost twice as big as Texas.
• If they were a country, it’d be in the top 15% of nations in the world, with more people than Canada, Argentina, or Poland. It’d be practically two Yemens.
• If you put one frog in a football stadium for each of the 44MM people who get help here each month, that would be forty-four MILLION frogs. Think about that. But don’t say it out loud. People are quick to judge.

Making the Internet a Better Place

The next chapter of Stack Exchange is still being written. A few years ago, we widened our vision beyond programmers. Our new goal was simple, if a bit daunting:

Make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions.

We asked people what other sites they wanted, and carefully started launching them, one at a time. Each time, we were counting on a group of experts to come together and start asking and answering each other’s questions. There have been a few failures along the way, but overall, the successes have been amazing.

We’re now up to 106 sites, including some outstanding ones on System Administration, Computers, Mathematics, Ubuntu, Video Games, and Cooking, and some young upstarts like our site for English Language Learners. If there’s a site you want to see that doesn’t exist yet, you can still propose it on Area 51.

At the same time, Stack Overflow is continuing to grow, and we are doing our best to keep it healthy. The short history of the internet is littered with communities that started out great, but slowly petered out under the weight of flame wars, mass-n00bocide, funny cat pictures, or just boredom waiting for the next big thing. We still need your help to keep Stack Overflow focused on its core mission: collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world.

Tell Us Your Story

We want to hear your stories. Looking at numbers is one thing, but hearing from real, live people about how someone’s effort here helped them is entirely different. So, if someone’s post here ever saved your day at work, or convinced you to buy your daughter an SLR and learn photography together, take a minute to recognize the person who wrote the answer that mattered to you.

If you’re somebody who mostly answers questions, share how you got involved and what keeps you coming back.  Or tell us about someone who taught you something before we even existed. They deserve to be recognized for the way their investment in you is getting passed on to others here today. If Stack Exchange got you interested in a new topic or taught you a new trick for an old one, we want to hear about it.

Stack Exchange has always been about a community of people helping each other out. It was a long shot when it launched, but you made it work. Now, let’s take a few minutes to recognize everything that we’ve achieved together.

It pains me when I hear people say that our sites are unfriendly, or that we chase new users away. But it’s a hard problem, because our highest priority has always been the quality of content on our sites.  And it still is. We can’t lower our standards. We won’t.

But we have been working hard to make our sites more welcoming, reminding users that feedback can be clear and nice, and helping new users learn the ropes before they get frustrated.  And, as of today, we’ve completely overhauled closing. 

Closing, we just can’t quit you.

Oh, closing.  You are the watcher on the walls. You are the shield that guards the realms of men. Okay, so it’s possible that I may be thinking of the Night’s Watch. No matter.

Closing is a big part of what separates us from other, um… less focused Q&A sites. It’s what ensures that our sites remain the kind of places that experts want to be. Closing… was working. But it wasn’t perfect.

Closing wasn’t clear.

Our close reasons were designed for experienced users, but did little to help the author of the question understand what the heck was going on. Over time, as we tried to make five close reasons address hundreds of question types, they became too broad to actually convey what’s wrong.  Identifying the common factors of poor questions was a good idea, but we took it a little too far.

It’s confusing ask for help solving a specific programming problem, only to be told that it’s”not about programming”. Or to ask which router to buy, just to learn that you’re likely to solicit “debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.” Really?  You guys take routers pretty seriously here.

Now, it’s not that we want those questions, but we need to convey exactly why we don’t want them.  Imagine if police could give out summons that, rather than, “failure to stop at a signal,” just read, “behavioral violation”. When feedback isn’t specific, it’s impossible to fix the problem, but easy to write it off as probably coming from a bunch of grumpy old jerkfaces who’d rather make you look like an idiot than actually help you.

Closing wasn’t nice.

Having your question closed feels lousy; there’s no doubt about it.  Now, we don’t care as much about nice as we do about quality - but that’s not a real dichotomy.  We can be more constructive in conveying our standards without lowering them one bit.   And we need to, because whether we liked it or not:

Having your question closed feels like a personal attack.

It is off-putting to be told that your question is “not constructive”.  To the poster, “not constructive” doesn’t sound like polite feedback; it sounds like something a slightly detached guidance counselor might say to a child.  And,”not a real question”?  Does that make the listener want to get “realer” or to snarkily link to a definition of the word “question”?

Ironically, we picked those terms explicitly because they were nicer ways to convey what we meant. And they were nicer than, “You’re kind of ranting and being a jackass,” or, “No one can answer that ambiguous nonsense.”  But so is prefacing my feedback to my wife with:

It could be just me, but I feel like you’re acting completely nutballs crazy.

In both cases, we’ve gotten nicer than we started, but we’re still pretty far shy of where someone might actually accept our feedback.

Fixing your closed question didn’t work

The goal was always for some closures to drive an edit, improve, re-open cycle. The user gets helped, gets better at asking, and the community gets useful content. Unfortunately, since there was no way to know when a question had been improved, this almost never happened.

We can do better.

We’re not going to lower our standards.  But if we want to educate new users, we need get better at three things:

1. make users want to improve questions, not argue about them – “terminated as too sucky; re-submit when less so,” and, “needs more information, add detail to move forward” are different. One makes you want to work your way to the next stage. One makes you want to kick someone’s shins.
2. make it clear exactly what needs to be fixed, or is problematic, without relying on information on another page.
3. provide a clear path for to get questions re-opened –  questions that are brought up to our standards should get reopened.

Here’s how:

1. “On hold” will replace “closed” on newly closed posts
   The word “closed” sounded final. Think about “closed” discussions, real estate deals, or job applications. In each case,”closed” means,
   a) additional revisions are not welcome, and b) the matter won’t be further considered.We led with a word that sounded final, so when we eventually told users they could edit their post, they weren’t listening; they were dusting off the old debate uniform to argue their case.“on hold” better conveys what we always meant:

   If you can edit your question to better fit our model, we can get you the help you need.

   Questions not re-opened within five days will revert to displaying as “closed,” to serve as a clearer signpost going forward.

2. New close reasons are nicer and clearer
   1. “not constructive” and “not a real question” are replaced by:
      

      too broad – There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.

      unclear what you’re asking - Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it’s currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you’re asking.

      primarily opinion based - Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.

      They’re much less likely to make the reader defensive, and much more specific about exactly what to fix.

   2. “Off-Topic” now includes site-specific close reasons
      Many communities have decided that some questions that sound like they fall under the topic “headline” (“cooking”,  “photography”, etc.) should be explicitly disallowed:

      • On our cooking site, recipe requests are off-topic, (but recipe replacements questions are allowed).
      • On photography – “fix my picture” questions are off topic, (but specific technique requests are allowed).
      • Stack Overflow is about programming, but programming questions you’d solve on a whiteboard or that ask what’s wrong with a large block of code are no good.

      Each example seems on-topic, but the community definition of what’s allowed has been adjusted to exclude them. These nuanced definitions have always been in each site’s help center (formerly the FAQ,) and are also the new user About page.

      And, as of today, they are also available to “off-topic”  close-voters right in the close dialogue. Users can pick one from the site’s list, or if none apply, they can enter a free-form one which will appear as a comment and as a choice for others voting to close the same question:

      “Your question appears to be about ferret grooming, which is off-topic for Stack Overflow”.

      These site-specific reasons will also address situations previously covered by “General Reference” and “Too Localized”. Those were the least used and most misused reasons – moderator and team sampling found a huge percentage of their application to be erroneous. (References to location in a question were particularly dangerous – never mind that a couple of billion people might live there.)  But they did have some important uses:

      • Questions that could be answered with a single dictionary search on English, and
      • Unguided requests to debug huge blocks of code on Stack Overflow

      In almost all of their good uses, they were clarifying what a community, over time, had deemed to be off-topic for their site. Programming questions, but not code dumps. English language questions, but not single search definitions.  

   3. Duplicates now focus on redirection to the answers you need
      All dupes now must point to an answered question, and the new language focuses on getting you answers:

      marked as [duplicate] – this question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please edit this question to explain how it is different, or ask a new question.

3. Questions edited by the original poster automatically go to the re-open queue
   Once there, other users will review and can re-open improved posts.  No more flagging your own question, or going to Meta to  request a formal appellate review. If you make meaningful edits to your question within five days of being put on hold, it gets considered for re-opening.

Oh, one last thing.

Thank you. A ton of work has gone into this, and as usual, the best ideas came from user input on Meta, so we hope you’re as proud of these changes as we are. We truly appreciate your feedback, and you’ve been incredibly vocal in your support for almost all of the changes.  We know some of you have concerns about moving the good parts of “too localized” into the off-topic menu. We’re listening, and are going to keep a close eye on it as we roll it out network-wide.  In particular, we want to know if you’re finding things that you can’t close now, but could before, and we’ll continue to adjust and iterate based on what we learn.

It really seems like there should be some kind of badge for reading something this long, but the devs shot that idea down.  Hard.  Apparently we “will never ever offer badges to promote your endless ramblings, Jay.”

It would have felt nicer if they’d told me the idea was on hold.

We’ve just rolled out a new Quick Start guide to help new users learn the basics. Here’s one example, but you can find any site’s version by going to sitename.com/about.

Imagine you’re visiting a new friend’s home and…

“Please, make yourself at home. Oh, actually, could you not sit on that? Yes, it looks like a couch. That’s what makes it so avant-garde. But it’s actually art. Whoah, careful there, too – I see your confusion, as that does resemble a doorknob, but it’s actually a very small furnace. And – I’m sorry, but – could you NOT use a coaster? We’re testing the effects of wet drinks on finished wood, and coaster usage generates noise in our data.”

When you’re surrounded by familiar things, but using them the way you normally do leads to different, negative outcomes, it’s extremely disorienting.

At Stack Exchange, “weird” is a feature, not a bug.

Our sites are different. And that difference is deliberate. The things that confuse folks who are used to forums, or those broad, “ask anything” sites are the very things that we believe make us work better.

I’m a little embarrassed I couldn’t turn this up sooner.

For us, different is good. Just like my mommy always told me. But it’s still jarring. And when it’s too jarring, potentially valuable contributors are put off and leave. They didn’t get help, and we lost an expert. Being jarring came at a high cost.

Easing them into our weirdness.

To mitigate new users’ frustration, we need a page that can do three things:

1. Describe just the ways that we’re different.

We don’t bother telling users about the things that are similar to the other sites they’ve used. Instead, we focus on the delta – the things that are likely to be surprises to them. For example:

• Posts are collaboratively edited
• Chit chat and pure discussion are generally not welcome
• Some things that sound a lot like what’s on topic are expressly off-topic here, and questions about those things get closed.

Now, obviously, users could just discover these things as they use the site, but however much you do or don’t grok our system, surprises suck. Most of life’s surprises fall closer to the kind involving gum discoveries in improbable locations than the ones that come in pony-shaped boxes. Whatever you think about a rule’s merit, learning about it after you’ve broken it tends to adversely impact your view of it. There’s a big difference between giving your wife a poem you wrote her, only to recieve a red-lined markup, complete with suggestions as to how to be less derivative, and having her edit one that you’re hoping to submit to a journal after she offered to give you feedback.

2. Explain why we’re different.

If you’re going to make someone think, or god forbid, try to change the way they do something, you damn well better convince them there’s a good reason.

• Why allow users to edit each other’s posts? Because it makes the average quality of our content higher than sites where responses are limited to a single user’s experiences.
• Why edit out harmless chit chat? Because we want to make the best answers more findable than they are in traditional forums.

If you tell someone you don’t allow chit-chat, but you fail to give them the reason, the first time they have their “thank you!” deleted as noise, they’re less likely to think about our “answer findability optimization” than our “tendency toward pedantic, manners-hating fascism”.

3. Get them to actually read it.

Research tells us that pages like this are significantly less effective if no one reads them. The challenge is that, surprisingly, most people who arrive at a website with a problem to solve do not seem to have the following first instinct:

“I wonder if they have any detailed, hopefully exhaustive documentation that covers their rules, best practices and societal mores. I’d just love to read it in its entirety before trying to get help with my problem!”

Does it cover typing in boxes on websites? That’s what I need to learn about.

Now, I do realize that some non-trivial portion of this blog’s audience is like us, and is thinking that that’s actually exactly what we might do. Which is why we love you so much. But, most people, even most experts, are not like us. Please trust me when I tell you this:

Most people do not believe they should need to expand their education in any way whatsoever prior to typing in a box on the internet.

They just don’t. So, if you want any shot at getting them to read a primer, you need to make it easy on the eyes, and keep it to a length that respects their time, rather than one that implies that they may need to secure some provisions or sled dogs prior to proceeding.

So, we pared it to just those topics that were absolutely necessary for a new user to get started successfully. Which was the hardest part; it’s much easier to be comprehensive than brief. Some of our choices may surprise you, but they all resulted from analysis, testing, and discussion. “Tags? Really?” Yep, we felt the same way. Until we did some user testing and almost every single user on the non-tech sites expressed some variation of the following:

“You said I had to add a tag. I didn’t even know what a tag WAS, but I used my context clues and I figured it out. And added one. And now it’s telling me that I NEED MORE REPUTATION TO CREATE NEW &*%$ing tags. I hope a rock falls on you. A heavy one.”

Tagging may not seem like something a new user needs to be thinking about, but it’s actually critical because almost invariably, they get it wrong. The same is true for comments and even editing. The subject-matter experts who do stick around long enough to make a few mistakes will learn, but often after frustrating themselves – and site regulars – in the process. Knowing roughly what to expect going in should help to ease the transition for all involved.

Which is good, because we can’t afford to have a site’s next Jon Skeet wasting his time casting geologic hexes on me, when we really need him to focus his energy on answering questions. Hopefully, this guide will help.