Jeff Atwood

community February 29, 2012

Let’s Play The Guessing Game

We’ve observed a particular pattern of questions emerging on several Stack Exchange sites. All these questions are effectively guessing games. I remember myself playing this a bit childish, but in some ways awesome game, where you control a tank, and can pick up and stack turrets (and maybe something else) from enemy tanks you kill.…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community February 24, 2012

Stack Exchange’s Greatest Hits

We have a lot of Q&A; sites in the Stack Exchange network now. 84 at the current moment. That’s … a lot of Q&A; sites. But most people* don’t find us by browsing the site directory; they find us by encountering a Stack Exchange page in their web search results. So that may lead you…
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Co-Founder (Former)
background February 18, 2012

Stack Exchange Open Source Projects

While we decided a long time ago that we wouldn’t be open-sourcing the core Stack Exchange Q&A engine, we do try very hard to open source as many useful parts of our code as we can. As Stack Overflow is one of the most prominent Microsoft .NET-created sites for software developers in the world, we…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community February 8, 2012

Stack Exchange Keyboard Shortcuts

Scott Hanselman’s article about keyboard shortcuts and web sites reminded me that I inexplicably forgot to blog about our very own totally awesome set of keyboard shortcuts for Stack Exchange! While we haven’t yet integrated keyboard shortcuts into the core site, the Stack Exchange Official Keyboard Shortcuts browser script is explicitly supported and actively maintained…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community January 31, 2012

The Trouble With Popularity

Way back in 2008, we had Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, the founders and co-creators of Reddit, on the Stack Overflow podcast. We chatted about a bunch of stuff, but one of the things they said that always stuck with me was that Reddit always took an explicitly hands-off, no moderation approach to their content…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community December 8, 2011

Don’t Be Afraid to Use The Science

I saw an interesting Battlefield 3 question on gaming a few weeks ago. I’ve recently unlocked the EOD bot, and while playing around with it (and being hopelessly ineffectual with it) I’ve noticed that after I have driven a certain distance away I will return back to first-person view. Running towards the EOD bot will…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community October 8, 2011

Improved Global Email Notifications

Our track record on email notifications has been mixed at best. Since early 2009, we’ve had some forms of email notification, including: A checkbox under each question you own, asking if you want email notifications for that specific question. A long since removed “oh, you’ve been away for 7 days, so we will mail you…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
api September 30, 2011

Stack Exchange API Usage Stats and API 2.0 Plans

Stack Exchange has a very full featured, albeit currently read-only, API. You can view some of the nifty applications people have created with the Stack Exchange API in the app gallery on Stack Apps, or check out the winners of the Stack Exchange API contest we held last year. We’re currently in the planning stages…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community September 23, 2011

Bounty Reasons and Post Notices

It’s been a little over a year since our last improvement to the bounty system. Question bounties have been working well enough that we’re comfortable encouraging even more use of the bounty system. We used to limit people to one question bounty at a time, but now you can have up to three simultaneous question…
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Co-Founder (Former)
cc-wiki-dump September 20, 2011

Creative Commons Data Dump Sep ’11

While we will always continue to produce Stack Exchange creative commons data dumps, we are moving to a quarterly schedule for all future dumps. We won’t be blogging each and every one, as it gets a bit monotonous. Please subscribe to our Clear Bits creator feed to be automatically notified when new Stack Exchange creative…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community September 5, 2011

Expanding User Cards

As I’ve said many times, the reason any Stack Exchange site works is not because of the magical software bits, but because the people participating are smart, talented, and willing to teach and learn. That’s right, any internet community ultimately succeeds or fails on the strength and quality of its contributors. Shocking, I know! But…
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Co-Founder (Former)
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