Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #58 brought to you by the Stack Exchange iOS app! Our hosts Joel Spolsky, David Fullerton, and Jay Hanlon are joined this week by our guests, the Stack Exchange Design Team: Jin Yang, Stéphane “The French Guy” Martin, Courtny Cotten, and Josh Hynes.

Let’s kick things off with Community Milestones (assuming Joel knows where he is).

• Joomla!
  • IHOP dot com is a Joomla! site.
• Unrelated: Donald Knuth mentioned our TeX site in a recent TUGboat.
• Earth Science
  • Why do snowflakes form into hexagonal structures?
  • What is the status of the Raymo & Ruddiman idea that Tibet cooled the Earth?
  • Joel had a rock computer when he was a kid. We’re not sure that’s a real thing. (UPDATE: it is!)
• Academia has graduated and has a beautiful new design, thanks to designer Stéphane Martin.

New Features

• The iPhone app is coming! [Ed: it has now been released!]
• We’re also working on instant automagical refresh in the apps.
• The MSO/MSE split happened! But we already talked about it.
• We’re busy breaking Super User by trying to migrate it over to CloudFlare.
• Coming soon… Careers 2.0 City Pages!

Community of the Week: Travel

• Why do people on airplanes often have tomato juice as a drink?
• OK we’re all adults here, so really, how on earth should I use a squat toilet?
• Why are airline passengers asked to lift up window shades during takeoff and landing?
• How to avoid drinking vodka?

And now we turn to our special guests! Jin Yang is the founding member of the design team. Stéphane Martin is the French guy, and he’s in the U.S. for the first time! Courtny Cotten is from Indiana, and Josh Hynes is from Pennsylvania. Those places aren’t as cool as France (apparently).

So, what does the design team do? Jin gives us his memorized elevator pitch for what Stack Exchange designers do all day. (It includes beer pong, but probably not in the way you’re thinking.) Stéphane designed the new look and feel for Academia and tells us about the process creating the look and feel for that fully graduated community. Courtny’s worked on the new Careers 2.0 city pages, and Careers search results. Josh worked on reporting, messaging for Careers, and the new user profile page on the Q&A sites. Both of them are working on new features for Careers right now. We also delve deeper into Stack Exchange design culture and history. Anecdotes! Anecdotes galore!

Thanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #58, brought to you by our iOS app… and Jay’s crappy Batman drawing.

Podcast #58 - Pack 'Em In Like Bees [ 59:18 ] Download

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Earlier this year, we announced the release of our Android application and the public feedback was fantastic. Well, it turns out we offended our designers by not doing an iPhone application too. So, after spending the last few months apologizing and bribing them (turns out designers love moleskins in pantone colors), we’re excited to announce the release of Stack Exchange for your iPhone.

Feed Me, Seymour

At the heart of our mobile applications is The Feed which gives you a deeply personalized selection of content customized to what’s relevant to you.

It includes any new answers, comments, or upvotes on your posts, and even new questions we think you’d like based on your previous activity. It basically does all the hard work to make it so you always have something interesting waiting for you a tap on a blue icon away. Since it’s personalized, try not to judge me based on how nerdy the following sample is:

Real time feedback

Stack Exchange for iPhone sends you instant notifications any time someone interacts with you, so when you urgently need to figure out how long cooked chicken lasts in the fridge (turns out, a couple days) you’ll get a notification the second someone answers your question.

And you can always customize the notifications in your iPhone’s built in Settings, in case you don’t want to get a message in the middle of the night (and end up dreaming of chicken).

Like Stack Exchange on your computer, but better.

You can ask, answer, comment, and vote, and there’s even a built-in Markdown keyboard. Plus, you can upload images straight from your device.

The next time you want to identify a cool font you see on a poster, you can immediately post a question with a picture of it from your iPhone.

What about feature [...]?

While the application currently has some awesome features, it doesn’t have everything. If you find something wrong or missing, please let us know. Use your fancy new app to post a question on Meta using the ios-app tag.

There are already some great suggestions, and while we’re currently working on a dedicated tablet interface for both iPads and Android, the urgency of our iPhone improvements will be pretty closely related to the vote count of posts on meta.

Speaking of which, we’d like to give a huge thanks to the awesome people who answered our call to arms (well, thumbs) to test this application, and who provided us with great feedback (including the list of suggestions above).

So, what are you waiting for? Go download Stack Exchange on your iPhone now and you’ll  never have to wait until you get back home to figure out “What was that movie with the guy and that thing?” again!

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Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #57, recorded Friday April 11, 2014 with your hosts Jay Hanlon, David Fullerton, and Joel Spolsky. Today’s podcast is brought to you by the Heartbleed bug.

We have lots to talk about (which makes Joel scared), starting with Community Milestones (after we discuss 2048 strategy, that is)!

• Expats is newly in public beta. It’s a site for people that are dealing with the bureaucratic messes involved in living outside your home country. Check out their top-voted questions.
  • Can I lose my US citizenship for accepting employment within a foreign government?
  • How do I deal with PPACA (“Obamacare”) as an expatriate?
  • How to build credit history in the USA?
  • Tax residency when in the EU for less than 6 months
• And we’ve added yet another math site to the network: Math Educators.
• Graphic Design has graduated from public beta, and it now has its own beautiful design – check it out! (It’s a great site, but it also helps Jay do things like this.)

That brings us to our Community of the Week: Information Security. (For the record: horses can live in barns.) Info Security has gotten a lot of traffic lately thanks to our sponsor, the Heartbleed bug. (We wonder if we’re spelling “security” wrong for a while before we realize the site is down. So we’ll come back to this.)

Aaaanyway… let’s talk about New Features.

1. The iOS app is going to come out in the next 6-8 weeks, but you can still sign up to test it for us if you have an iPhone.
2. Also, we did an April Fool’s prank about unicoins.
3. We’re making some changes to the Community Wiki system. There’s a blog post here if you’d rather fast forward through Jay’s explanation.
4. We’re also making changes to how protecting questions works, and we’ve published a set of guidelines for how to use that feature.

That finishes the New Features segment… except for the other new features we’re going to talk about. Breaking news: we’re overhauling the profile page. (Stick with us in this part to hear Joel get bored and start talking about emo kid piercings!) There’s a very outdated mockup here.

Then, Joel gets so bored he brings up sports. On purpose. Several times. Also: this is what a Yugo looks like.

MOVING ON. The gang invents a new game, and plays it for a while. Could this be a recurring segment? Tune in next week to find out! For now, we’ve killed enough time that Info Security is back online, so we’ll talk about it for a while.

• How exactly does the OpenSSL TLS heartbeet (Heartbleed) exploit work?
• Don’t understand how my mum’s Gmail account was hacked
• How does changing your password every 90 days incease security?

Thanks for joining us during this very productive hour of your life for Stack Exchange Podcast #57, brought to you by Heartbleed – the first buffer overflow bug with a website, a logo, and a marketing department.

Podcast #57: We Just Saw This On Florp [ 46:08 ] Download

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Ever seen this diagram?

That’s the visual elevator pitch for Stack Exchange. We were the little dot in the middle, a potent mix of useful traits from other tools, a wiry mutt full of hybrid vigor. The purpose of this blend was to allow and encourage the construction of a library of solutions, by providing communities with the tools they needed to share their experiences and challenges with others who might struggle with the same issues.

The diagram illustrated where we stole drew inspiration for the design of those tools, and their influence occasionally shows up in the results. Sometimes, a question will end up more like a wiki, other times more like a blog, other times more like a discussion. Because of these roots, we’ve never been too stuck on the purity of the idea of Q&A: over time, when communities using this software needed to deviate a bit, we’ve tried to build in features to give them what they needed to help solve more problems:

• Users wanted to “blog” about questions where they’d already found solutions, so we introduced self-answered questions
• People occasionally found themselves needing ongoing discussion to solve a problem, so we added chat forums

…And sometimes, folks realized that they needed a bunch of people to contribute meaningfully to create a post. Not just the collaborative, minor editing that occurs on most questions here; these were cases where multiple users needed to pitch in just to do a topic justice. But there were two points of friction:

1. Originally, most users couldn’t edit others’ posts, (we didn’t have suggested edits yet)
2. It’s hard to ask people to put a lot of effort into creating something together when the asker is going to keep all the credit and all the reputation. I don’t care about rep and attribution when I’m self-motivated to improve a post I come across, but it feels different when someone outright asks me to pitch in while intending to keep all the fake internet points for themselves!

That’s where Community Wiki came in – it killed those friction points by eliminating rep generation from those posts and lowering the bar on who could edit them. Which made it much easier for people who wanted to create collaborative, ensemble works – true community owned and edited resources.

But, much like dynamite, this well-intentioned invention was quickly weaponized into an instrument of destruction. Our big mistake: thinking we could systematically detect when such collaboration was happening, and automatically convert those posts to Community Wiki. It sounded awesome – “we’ll help you collaborate even more! When we see enough editors, we’ll save you the trouble of making it community wiki yourself and do it for you…”

Yeah, we are dumb.

In which we stop being dumb

By using ridiculously simplistic heuristics to detect these scenarios, we turned what should have been an act of generosity – an invitation to the community to participate in building a shared resource – into a hidden pitfall for the unwary. Too many helpers? NO ONE GETS CREDIT!!! It was a system that converted helpfulness and generosity into a slap in the face – from a robot.

Therefore, we have removed all automatic Wiki conversion triggers from the software. No longer will answers with more than some arbitrary number of edits, or questions with more than a page of answers suddenly lose their owners. To handle those rare situations where unusual activity levels may indicate misuse, we’ve added some new moderator flags in these scenarios: they can respond when necessary by closing or locking the post – but when there is no fire behind the smoke, they can silently dismiss the flag without disruption.

The once again future of Community Wiki

An author can still apply the status manually when posting or when editing their own answer, and moderators retain the ability to apply it when they deem it truly necessary (for instance, a question attracting very large numbers of partial answers can be a sign of a topic that wants to be a wiki). For the most part, we’ve turned it back into something that you can choose to use in cases where it lets you work together to create something wonderful:

• Compiling a canonical reference
• Consolidating the knowledge of the community
• Encouraging the ongoing, active maintenance of a changing answer

Sometimes these are single, collaborative answers, other times questions where all contributions must be made in the form of edits. In all cases, the results are clearly that of a sum greater than the whole of its parts, a true community project.

source: Wikimedia Commons

Collaboration isn’t a rare thing on our network – the whole system, from posting and editing to voting to moderation, is based on the interaction of multiple users to produce a final product. Community wiki is for a special scenario, something built not by the expertise of one individual, then improved or iterated on by a few others, but rather something created by the concerted efforts of the community as a whole.

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We’re very pleased to announce that as of today, we’re (finally) splitting the site formerly known as Meta Stack Overflow into two sites:

Meta Stack Overflow is a brand-spanking new site for discussions specific to the Stack Overflow (programming) community:

Meta Stack Exchange will cover feature requests, bugs, and any discussion topics that affect the entire network:

Meta has always been one of the most important things that make our network… work. Almost all of our most important features, improvements, and community rules were partly or entirely based on our users telling us how we could help you help more people. Hell, even the idea of Meta itself came from the community – and we fought it hard before we realized how right you guys were. But meta has always had two key functions:

1. Local governance – communities have to decide what’s on- and off- topic, what tags to use, and how to deal with topic-specific guidelines like how sources should be cited.
2. Federal law and product feedback – Most changes to the engine affect all sites, and some guidelines and rules (“be nice”) are the same network wide.

And that’s why every site except Stack Overflow has always had its own meta site, so it could focus on the “local governance” issues that were specific to that community. But as the network has grown, many users have shown enthusiasm not just about the sites where they participate, but also about how the whole system should work. It’s time to give these discussions a place of their own.

Prior to today, Meta Stack Overflow doubled as the home of both discussions about broad network changes, and discussions around the unique issues that Stack Overflow faces (often due to its enormous scale). The percent of problems Stack Overflow shares with its smaller sister sites has become exceedingly low, which has created an awkward dissonance when it comes to how folks perceive and approach challenges.

For example, some new sites embrace the idea of highly specific, narrowly-scoped questions that seek product recommendations, – something that is perfectly acceptable to explore on many sites but completely off-limits on Stack Overflow.

Someone else might be interested in strategies to better promote and grow new sites when they come out of private beta, which might apply to many network sites, but is obviously a problem that the Stack Overflow community is not facing. The scale of Stack Overflow puts an interesting twist on almost every discussion that the Stack Overflow community has; they needed a place of their own to work on their own challenges. Similarly, someone outside of the Stack Overflow community that wants to propose a new feature isn’t likely to be super interested in XML tag synonyms.

When you visit Meta Stack Exchange, you’ll see that the split is still a a work in progress. We’re in the process of migrating quite a few Stack Overflow specific discussions that are still relevant and unresolved, to help to show the kind of topics that belong on the new MSO. Over time we’ll continue to migrate discussions that clearly belong on Meta Stack Overflow back over the fence.

If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts and mechanics of the split itself (such as how rep is going to work, moderators, etc), have a look at the initial project announcement. The plan was extremely simple, and we stuck to it.

Now, we realize that we weren’t exactly hurting for “more challenges in figuring out where to put my post”. That’s why we’re making this really simple:

When in doubt, you can always post your question on your local meta. If it’s clearly relevant to the engine or network as a whole, we’ll move it.

You can always find your local meta right under the main site in the site switcher in the upper left corner of the site:

If you have any input or ideas to share, just go right to your favorite site’s meta and do it there; there’s no need for you to go to Meta Stack Exchange at all.

That said, any time you know your question applies to the the whole network, you’re of course perfectly welcome to participate on Meta Stack Exchange directly.

The largest beneficiary of this split is probably the Stack Overflow community; our flagship site went without a town hall all of its own for way too long. Splitting the two opens up many more possibilities while alleviating noise for everyone.

Young sites don’t generally have, and may never have the sorts of challenges that Stack Overflow did. Now, there’s a place for our smaller communities to come together and figure out what works for them.

Do you have some great ideas that could make quite a few communities even better? Take them to your site’s own little town hall, or feel free to bring them to the capital city directly. Do you have ideas that suit the scale of Stack Overflow? Well then, c’mon, get meta, as it was intended.

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