Stack Overflow is a privately held website, the flagship site of the Stack
Exchange Network, created in 2008 by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. It was
created to be a more open alternative to earlier Q&A sites such as
Experts-Exchange. The name for the website was chosen by voting in April
2008 by readers of Coding Horror, Atwood's popular programming blog.
It features questions and answers on a wide range of topics in computer
programming. The website serves as a platform for
users to ask and answer questions, and, through membership and active
participation, to vote questions and answers up or down and edit questions
and answers in a fashion similar to a wiki or Digg. Users of Stack Overflow
can earn reputation points and "badges"; for example, a person is awarded 10
reputation points for receiving an "up" vote on an answer given to a question,
and can receive badges for their valued contributions, which represents a kind
of gamification of the traditional Q&A site or forum. All user-generated
content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike license.
Closing questions is a main differentiation from Yahoo! Answers and
a way to prevent low quality questions. The mechanism was overhauled in 2013;
questions edited after being put "on hold" now appear in a review queue. Jeff
Atwood stated in 2010 that duplicate questions are not seen as a problem but
rather they constitute an advantage if such additional questions drive extra
traffic to the site by multiplying relevant keyword hits in search engines.
As of April 2014, Stack Overflow has over 4,000,000 registered users and more
than 11,000,000 questions, with 10,000,000 questions celebrated in late
August 2015. Based on the type of tags assigned to questions, the top eight
most discussed topics on the site are: Java, JavaScript, C#, PHP, Android,
jQuery, Python and HTML. History
The website was created by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky in 2008. On 31 July
2008, Jeff Atwood sent out invitations encouraging his subscribers to take part
in the private beta of the new website, limiting its use to those willing to
test out the new software. On 15 September 2008 it was announced the
public beta version was in session and that the general public was now able to
use it to seek assistance on programming related issues. The design of the Stack
Overflow logo was decided by a voting process.
On 3 May 2010 it was announced that Stack Overflow had raised $6 million in
venture capital from a group of investors led by Union Square Ventures.
= Content criteria = Stack Overflow admits questions about
programming that are tightly focused on a specific problem. Questions that are
of a broader nature or invite answers that are inherently a matter of opinion
are usually closed by a process carried out by the site's participants. The
sister site programmers.stackexchange.com is
intended to be a venue for some such broader questions, such as questions
about agile software development in general.
= User suspension = In April 2009, Stack Exchange
implemented a policy of "timed suspension", in order to curtail users
who either show "No effort to learn and improve over time" or engage in
"disruptive behavior" and become a nuisance. The suspension is accompanied
by temporarily setting the user's reputation score at '1' and a notation
on the user's profile page indicating the suspension and remaining duration.
Statistics A 2013 study has found that 77% of users
only ask one question, 65% only answer one question, and only 8% of users
answer more than 5 questions. As of 2011, 92% of the questions were
answered, in a median time of 11 minutes. Since 2013, the Stack Exchange
network software automatically deletes questions that meet certain criteria,
including having no answers in a certain amount of time.
As of August 2012, 443,000 of the 1.3M registered users had answered at least
one question, and of those, approximately 6,000 had earned a
reputation score greater than 5000. Reputation can be gained fastest by
answering questions related to tags with lower expertise density, doing so
promptly, being active during off-peak hours, and contributing to diverse
areas. In June 2015, 125,313 posts were deleted
within the past 30 days, of which about 8% were deleted by moderators.
Technology Stack Overflow is written in C# using
the ASP.NET MVC framework, and Microsoft SQL Server for the database and the
Dapper object-relational mapper used for data access. Unregistered users have
access to most of the site's functionality, while users who sign in
can gain access to more functionality, such as establishing a profile and being
able to earn reputation to allow functionality like re-tagging questions
or voting to close a question. Reception
Stack Overflow received criticism regarding its community that prevents
women from actively participating in asking questions and answering them.
Such criticism raises that StackOverflow strongly promotes oneupmanship; fosters
flame-wars and the down-voting of individuals which discourages female
users from participating. The article also criticises the rewards system which
allow participants to access new features and gain more control on
others' postings. It is also stipulated that some users may be female believing
other users would be less aggressive towards them and their questions.
See also Askbot
OSQA Rosetta Code
List of Internet forums References
External links Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow podcast List of Stack Exchange sites
Stack Apps