It has been a great honor for all of us to have worked with Jeff over the last four years as Stack Exchange grew from absolutely nothing to a world-changing resource with over 30 million monthly visitors.

When I first met Jeff, I told him that when Stack Overflow was built, it would become a standard part of the programmer’s toolset… as important as an editor or a compiler. I’m not sure if he believed me at first. Heck, I didn’t believe me. But I’ll never forget the day it shipped, in August 2008, and I tried to ask my first question (something about a regexp for a URL that omitted the trailing dot) and found that it had already been asked, and answered, multiple times, and people had already voted up the best answer, and I knew right then that I hadn’t exaggerated. And now it has been years since I’ve met a programmer that doesn’t know and love Stack Overflow, and none of it would have been possible without Jeff’s amazing contribution.

The company has changed a lot in four years: we’ve gone from nothing to 50 employees; we raised over $18 million in venture capital to fund our next expansion; we have a network of 80 Q&A sites on topics from LEGO to cooking. That the company will continue to flourish in his absence is no doubt a testament to the great work Jeff did creating an institution dedicated to principles of making the Internet better.

Farewell, Jeff, we’ll miss you.

At this point the interface to V2.0 is frozen, only bug fixes and performance improvements will be deployed until the next revision.  As always, if you build on our platform we will support you so V2.0 will be around as long as it sees significant use.

You’ll find our revamped documentation portal at:

api.stackexchange.com

Alongside the documentation for every method, you’ll also find a test console for rapid experimentation.  Try out the console by finding Jon Skeet’s most recent comment.

We’ve also thrown together a minimalist Javascript SDK for consumers that just want to use the new authentication features.

Although the beta is over, the contest continues.  You have until the end of February to list any application or library on Stack Apps to be eligible, and you can continue to hunt the (now rather elusive) bugs left in the API.

Some Neat Apps That Are Already Available

StinkingBadges, created by agent86, lets you see your progress towards some of the harder Stack Exchange badges.  It’s a good example of filling a gap, rather like StackPrinter from V1.0.

Stack Alert, created by George Edison, takes advantage of the headlining authentication feature of V2.0 to give you access to your Stack Exchange inbox right in your browser.  While decidedly utilitarian, it is already available for Firefox, Opera, and Chrome.

StackGeography, created by patridge, plots where on the globe new questions are being asked.  Not entirely unlike our own monitor wall, but built on top of the public API.

While it’s only half-way through the contest, I’m pretty pleased with what I’ve seen thus far.

Of course, there’s plenty of time left to create an application.

If you’re interested go read the read the documentation and register your application.

I found that a bit shocking, since I’ve… never seen that work. Certainly on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange we are very much pro-moderation — and more so with every passing year. We have literally hundreds of community moderators. We spend a ton of time appointing and electing moderators, as well as conducting weekly moderator chats in the Teacher’s Lounge chatroom, and emailing all our mods a monthly moderator newsletter.

The Reddit founders maintained that evil things which require active moderation didn’t happen too often, provided you build the right kind of community voting and flagging mechanisms. I can agree with that. We’ve found that to be true on Stack Exchange as well. It’s almost enough to make you a believer in the fundamental goodness of human beings.

Almost.

But there’s a deeper, more insidious problem that creeps into systems when the community is unmoderated. Stuff like, say, compilable James Bond Java ASCII art …

… or mountain-climbing Skyrim horses and wounded Skyrim NPCs with vivid imaginations.

Let us not forget the classics, either:

• What’s Your Favorite Programming Cartoon?
• What’s Your Best Programming Joke?
• What Real Life Bad Habits Has Programming Given You?

… and so, so many more.

These sorts of posts are wildly popular with the community. The cartoon question alone had over a million views by our extremely strict view counter — which easily translates to at least two million views, possibly three million. We don’t hate fun here, but we discovered that these posts become so popular over time that they truly start to drown out everything else on the site.

Ironically, the Reddit community itself now recognizes that moderation is fundamental and essential:

One thing thing that does concern me, however, is that [as this subreddit gets more popular] the amount of image macros, memes, rage comics and generally low-quality content hitting the front page has grown to annoying proportions.

The problem with image macros and rage comics (besides generally lacking wit or anything genuinely insightful) is that they’re quick and easy to digest, and thus tend to get upvoted faster than self posts and actual discussions which take thought and time before an appropriate response can meted out. If you’re not careful you end up with something akin to /r/gaming, which is now a burbling, deformed wreck of its former self, with anything remotely resembling intelligent discussion being buried under a sea of vacuous meme-repetition.

In my view what this subreddit needs is a touch more moderation to ensure that we don’t end up with a front page full of imgur/memegenerator links, and that people who want to use this subreddit as a medium to discuss the [topic] can do so without having to sift through the crap with a shovel.

This is as clear a call for active moderation as I’ve ever seen. And the moderators, to their credit, took charge and instituted changes to help guide their community away from the fatty junk food content:

We’ve heard your concerns over the direction the community is heading. We were hoping we could ride it out and things would balance themselves, but it just isn’t working, and things need to change. It’s plain to see that meme-based content attracts many upvotes, and we all love a good laugh, but it is not what we want this community to be. But this isn’t just about memes, it’s about the general tone of the community. We’re making changes to our rules for posting, commenting, and voting here — necessary changes to make [this] the community we first envisioned.

This community is for sharing thought-provoking stories, high-level tactics discussions, videos/images of the awesomeness of [topic], suggestions or discussions on mechanics, and it can all be done without resorting to memes or complaining. Reddit never ceases to amaze, I expect to be surprised! If you have any questions, message the mods! We hope you agree and understand these changes.

We know that closing the cookie jar is painful. We feel your pain. Nobody likes having their fun taken away. But it’s too addictive and too easy, and in the absence of any moderation, the community would do nothing but add and upvote the easy, fun stuff.

This is why community moderators have real power; they need that power to intervene, educate, and refocus the community’s exuberance on more substantive content. People will fight you almost literally to the death over their right to be entertained, and to entertain others:

Why can’t you just not look at these fun posts? Why do they have to be deleted? You guys suck!

The same reason the moderators and community on that subreddit didn’t decide to “not look” at the fun posts, really:

1. Broken windows. Every ‘fun’ post users see is an open invitation for them to participate in the fun by adding their own fun question or answer. The stuff spreads like kudzu! Pretty soon the entire site is overrun with nothing but that kind of fun. And even if you grandfather a few in, you’ll enjoy neverending requests asking why their fun question or answer has to be removed, while this one over here is allowed to remain.

2. Opportunity cost. Every minute spent participating in an entertaining ‘fun’ post is time that someone could have spent asking or answering a substantive question, something practical that solves an actual problem for hundreds or thousands of people. Entertainment, within reason, is by no means a bad thing — but I experience almost physical pain when I think about a brilliant topic expert spending 10 minutes on one of our sites deciding which hilarious cartoon is their favorite.

Popularity is a tough thing. I’m tempted to call it a curse, but what we try to do at Stack Exchange is make sure that questions and answers are popular for the right reasons — because they are amazing resources for learning from your peers. If you want to slip a few jokes in there with the learning, that’s fine, but when the question devolves into little more than entertainment, I hope you can understand why our community moderators are obliged to step in and protect the community from, well … itself.

We’re now ranked #160 on Quantcast, which makes me wonder if maybe our big goal of becoming a “top 50 site on the Internet” was perhaps not ambitious enough. And the question and answer quality throughout our network is still rock solid, with 93% of questions getting at least one upvoted or accepted answer.

Anyway, we did one of those fun infographics you kids like so much, to highlight some of the accomplishments of the last year in vivid color, so check it out for more details.

Recap on last years changes

Since we publicly launched data explorer, the most notable change contributed back from the community was support for query plans, big thanks to Justin for submitting the patch.

We also added quite a few bug fixes/features, mostly around merging users. Some features were added to defend data.se against an onslaught of public queries. A few features were added to support non Stack Exchange data dumps, most notably a system for white listing. Our very own Rebecca Chernoff ported Data Explorer to ASP.NET MVC3 amongst many other fixes.

The current round of changes offers some very cool new functionality, which is worth listing:

Query revisions

When we created Data Explorer there was no way to track a query’s “lineage”. This was particularly problematic because we had no way of updating featured queries or shared queries. Even I complained about this on meta.

The new pipeline works just like Gist, you can track the history of your query as you are editing (attributing the various editors along the way):

You can link to a specific revision, or simply share a “query set” by using the permalink. By sharing a “query set” you can later on fix up any issues the query has, without needing to update the link. The new pipeline allows you to “fork” any query created by other users and tracks attribution along the way.

Graphs

We added some basic graphing facilities, supporting 2 types of line graphs:

The first type is a simple graph, where the first column represents the X-axis and the other columns the data points. For example: a graph of questions and answers per month.

The second type is a bit trickier, it unpivots the second column in the result set. For example: a graph of questions per tag for top 10 tags.

Huge open source upgrade

Data Explorer consumes a fair amount of open source libraries. In the past year and a half many have evolved. We took the time to upgrade them all.

The excellent Code Mirror was updated to the 2.0 version, the new version no longer uses messy iframes. Marjin wrote a great post explaining the changes, a fantastic read for any JavaScript developers.

SlickGrid, which in my opinion is the best grid control built on jQuery, was upgraded to version infinity.

100% more Dapper

Dapper our open source micro ORM is the only ORM Data Explorer uses. We took the time to port the entire solution to Dapper. I even added a few CRUD helpers so you are not stuck hard coding INSERT and UPDATE statements everywhere.

Data Explorer is a good open source example of how we code web sites at Stack Overflow. It is built on our stack using many of our helpers. Dapper and related helpers are used for data access. It uses the same homebrew migration system we use in production and an interesting asset packaging system I wrote (for the record, Ben wrote a much more awesome one that we use in production, lobby him to get it blogged). It also uses MiniProfiler for profiling. MiniProfiler is even enabled in production, so go have a play.

Lots of smaller less notable fixes

• We now have a concept of “user preferences”, so we can remember which tab you selected, etc.
• We remember the page you were at and try to redirect you there after you log on.
• We attribute the query properly to the creator / editor from the query show page.
• You can page through your queries on your user page.
• Support for arbitrary hyperlinks
• Revamped object browser, you can collapse table definitions
• Lots of other stuff I forgot :)

You too can run Data Explorer

At Stack Exchange we run 3 different instances of Data Explorer. We have the public Data Explorer and a couple of private instances we use to explore other data sets. The first private instance is used for raw site database access. The other is used to browse through our haproxy logs.

There is nothing forcing you to point Data Explorer at a Stack Exchange data dump, the vast majority of the features work fine pointed at an arbitrary database.

Hope you enjoy this round of changes.

If there are any bugs or feature requests please post them to Meta Stack Overflow. Data Explorer is open source, patches welcome.

What: Hot Topic of the Week

How it works: Pick a topic of the week, and enter everyone who asks a question related to that topic into a random drawing to win a prize. The number of entries a person gets is equal to the number of questions they ask about the topic of the week.

This is similar to the weekly topic challenge being held on Jewish Life & Learning, but adapted to a contest model. It’s pretty simple, but surprisingly effective, and there are a few key reasons why it works.

First of all, this contest incentivizes question-asking by offering a small prize, but the prize is not so large that it encourages users to cheat the system. The prize is randomly awarded, and you get more entries based on the number of questions you ask rather than the number of up votes you get, so there is no danger of sock puppet voting.  More importantly however, the topic of the week acts as an idea-generator; it gives people a specific topic to think about, and reminds them that they can ask questions about that topic (and other topics like it) on Stack Exchange. We’re always trying to come up with new ways to increase the amount of good content on our sites, and a contest makes asking questions more fun. A contest that increases the number of questions without threatening the quality of the information on our sites is the ideal way to go.

It’s important to remember that this contest will be better suited for some sites than others. For example, there are a greater number of possible topics for Literature and Philosophy (e.g. authors and philosophers) than there are for Apple and Android. However, that doesn’t mean the contest won’t have an effect on those sites.  The easiest way to maximize the effectiveness of this type of contest is to time it with the release of a hot new item. We recently ran Ice Cream Sandwich Week on Android (shortly after the Galaxy Nexus was released) and it was very successful. Before the start of the contest, there were 18 questions tagged “4.0-ice-cream-sandwich.”  That number more than doubled during Ice Cream Sandwich Week and continues to rise even after the contest is over. We did something similar on Literature by having Stieg Larsson Week close to the release of the US film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

I’ve been pretty pleased with version 1.1, stackexchange.com and our chat software make extensive use of it, there are a good number of useful applications listed, and a couple of parties are pulling interesting statistics out using it.  It’s been a success, but the shine’s definitely come off; there are some use cases we didn’t support, some missing features, and just some plain-old mistakes.

That’s why I’m pleased to announce…

The public beta for Version 2.0 of the Stack Exchange API

We’ve been consuming this internally for a bit, and a rather low-key private beta has been going on for the last few weeks.  With any luck we’ve flushed out any really bad bugs and functional deficiencies.

If you want to hop right in, go take a look at the documentation and then register an app.

Just like last time, we’re running a contest to encourage some applications that exercise the sweet new features in V2.0.

First Prize

For the most awesome application, you’ll get an iPad 2.

Second Prize

Second place will get an Acer Aspire One.

Third Prize

For third place, a 160 GB Intel SSD.

Library

We’ve tried to make the API easy to understand and use, we’re aware of the great advantages of wrapping some complexity away in a library.  Building an awesome library makes it easier for future developers to get up and running against our API.

The author of the best library will get a Kindle Fire.

Bug Reports

Even if you don’t have any app ideas, and can’t afford to invest the time needed in building a full library, you can still participate in the contest.  Each bug you find makes the API a little bit better for the rest of the community.

Those who we feel have contributed substantially to the quality of the API with their bug reports will get to choose between a Kindle Touch 3G, or a Lilliput Mini USB Monitor.

The Rules

• Contest open to every man, woman, and child on planet Earth, except those men, women, or children living in places where contests like this are somehow illegal.
• Only applications and libraries/wrappers listed on the apps tab of stackapps.com are eligible for consideration.
• The application or library/wrapper must be written using our API, and work against all of our sites.
• Libraries must expose all available methods in the API in some fashion.  I’d advise comprehensive examples to make it clear you’ve covered everything.
• While we do have a prize to recognize the best library/wrapper, to be eligible for the first 3 prizes you must build an application.
• If you live in an area of the world where it is logistically impossible for us to get your prize to you — like, say, because your nearest Apple retailer is 3000 nautical miles away — we’ll make something work.
• Your app must work against the final, 2.0 released version of the API.  The “beta” moniker will have come off the API before the contest ends.
• If your app depends on an app store for distribution, you must have some way of getting the app to us to judge if it is not yet approved when the contest ends.  We’ll contact you to get a copy, but you’ve got to get our notice first so put some real effort into your Stack Apps post.

We’ll be judging apps based on how awesome and useful we, the rapidly increasing employees of Stack Exchange, find them.

The library prize will be chosen by the development team, and who knows we may pull it into our projects (as Stacky, the previous winner, was into stackexchange.com).  While we don’t care about platform, we do care about documentation and examples, so make yours exemplary.

The bug report prizes will be sent to anyone we feel went above and beyond in finding bugs in the API, there’s no limit to the number of people who may win.

All entries must be listed on Stack Apps by 11:59 PM UTC February 29th, 2012, we’ll be judging entries in the first few weeks of March and announcing winners subsequently.

To kick off this “promotion seminar” series, here is a summary of previous projects, lessons learned, and links to more information.

Sponsoring (or Crashing) Events

When you hear of an interesting event related to your site, get out there and talk to people! Interact with them face to face. It will give you a chance to explain what Stack Exchange does and help spread some of your enthusiasm for the community.

NYC Lightsaber Battle (for SciFi): Yes, this happened. We gave away Jedi robes to 35 lucky winners, and everyone there received Star Wars-themed stickers with SciFi questions on them.

Rock ‘n’ Roll 10k (for Fitness & Nutrition): We set up a booth, handed out Fitness-branded water bottles and nutrition bars, and brought a massage therapist to give the runners a much-deserved back rub at the finish line. The Stack Exchange Fitness tent attracted a large crowd, which gave us plenty of time to talk to people and take their pictures with Bubbles, the Stack Exchange mascot.

Comic Con (for SciFi and Gaming): A band of CHAOS agents (Bubbles included) took NYCC by storm with more Star Wars stickers, SciFi and Gaming-branded stickers, and limited edition t-shirts.

Virtual Berry Tasting (for Cooking): Sounds weird right? Actually, it was brilliant! Driscoll’s Moments did a cooking demo and streamed the event so that other berry fans around the country could participate. It was a great way to bridge online and offline communities and introduce Seasoned Advice as a resource for chefs.

Important lessons: consider how you are going to capture the attention of the people at the event. Bubbles is great for making people curious enough to stop and talk to us, but there are also other (smaller) things you can do to get attention. The Star Wars stickers and nutrition bars were effective because we had the audience in mind when we got them made.

Also remember that the end goal is to drive users to your site. All the swag we give away is branded, and whenever someone wants their picture with Bubbles, we give them a card with our blog url so they can come check it out later (and visit our site in the process).

Surfing an Excitement Wave

At the beginning of November, everyone in the Gaming community was really excited about the back to back launch of two epic games: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.  We capitalized on that excitement by throwing a launch party on behalf of Gaming.SE to see which game generated the most interest. We converted the Fog Creek cafeteria into a gaming hub with food and commentators, and streamed it live. Oh, we also crashed (and filmed) the midnight releases of both games.

Important lessons: Capitalize on events that excite your community – it’s a great opportunity to build up a body of questions that will be popular in the coming weeks. As people start to search for these subjects, the depth of questions about them on your site may attract some awesome new users.

The Modern Warfare 3 vs. Skyrim promotion is our best example of riding a wave of excitement, and we’re working on new ways to adapt this tactic for other sites.

Sponsoring Blogs and Inviting Reviews

If there is a Stack Exchange site about a topic, there’s certainly an online community about it somewhere. If you want to reach these people, a few good places to start are the blogs and online magazines they read. We’ve sponsored and been reviewed on several blogs – Young House Love (for DIY), Grammar Girl (for EL&U), and American Stat. News (for Cross Validated) to name a few.

Important lessons: Do your research. Choose blogs that are related to your site and familiarize yourself with their content. Make sure the blogger accepts sponsorships, and focus on people who have medium-sized followings so they’ll pay attention to you. One effective method of reaching bloggers is to offer something that benefits the author. The interview on American Stat. News is a great example of this – they published it for free because Cross Validated was useful for their readers.

As with any other promotion, remember that the goal is to get new users. So when you sponsor a blog, make sure you have a hook to draw their readers to SE. Don’t just throw an ad up on the blog. Send intriguing questions to link to or interview the blogger beforehand and have them link to that. Put the interview on your site’s community blog and it will act as a gateway to Stack Exchange.

Random Acts of Internet Kindness

A great way to win people and influence friends is to give back to the people that make your field great. But it’s not always easy to do what we like to call random acts of internet kindness, so here are a few examples…

Give out swag
Site-specific swag, to be exact. Talk to the community, ask what would be useful, and then get it for them.

Connect people
When you know someone who needs help and you know someone who can help them, play matchmaker. The Stack Exchange Beta Tester Matchup Program is a great example of this. But you can make efforts to connect people on a smaller scale – like getting an expert to answer someone’s burning question.

Make people feel important
This is related to the blog sponsorship idea, but it warrants another mention because you can do it without any money. It can be as simple as retweeting or leaving a comment on a blog. If you make enough contact with someone, they’ll start to learn who you are.

This is only a brief glimpse of what CHAOS has been up to for the past 5 months. I hope these examples inspire you to launch a few promotional projects of your own. If you have any ideas for promotional events, let us know. We plan to profile more ideas and delve deeper into specific events and promotions, so check back!

Greetings to the Stack Exchange Moderators,

In a yearly tradition at Stack Exchange, we set aside this time of year to make sure we are “giving back” to effect positive change in the world. As a moderator, you play such a crucial role in our success, and we would like to include you in that effort.

As a small gesture of thanks, we would like to make a $100 donation to charity on behalf of each community moderator. The link below leads to a brief form where you can select which charity you wish to receive the donation.

Select Your “Giving Back” Charity

It is my hope that, together, we can continue this tradition year after year — and with 220+ moderators, that donation will only continue to increase.

So, thanks to everyone who participated in Stack Exchange. Thank you for generously contributing your time, your passion, and your leadership, all of which made these donations possible.

- The Stack Exchange Team

We started with 12 moderators, then 130 — and now on behalf of the 228 moderators of Stack Exchange, we made a donation to the following charities this holiday season:

• Unicef — $2,800
• Doctors Without Borders — $10,900
• Wikimedia Foundation — $7,000
• Amnesty International — $2,100

We also want to give back to the people, tools, and projects that inspired us and helped us build this Stack Exchange Q&A network:

• W3C Consortium — $1,000
• WordPress Foundation — $1,000
• WikiMedia Foundation — $1,000
• CentOS — $1,000
• Linux Foundation — $1,000
• Internet Archive — $1,000
• Creative Commons — $1,000
• DotNetOpenAuth — $500
• OpenID Foundation — $1,000
• OpenSTV — $1,000
• Lucene.Net — $1,000
• Electronic Frontier Foundation — $1,000

The notes returned in kind — the notes of “thank you” and heart-warming well-wishes — are a great way to end the year knowing that sometimes you just get it right, and that what you do matters. Let me end this year by extending a sentiment from the “giving back” letter to you, the users of Stack exchange:

Thank you for generously contributing your time, your passion, and your knowledge, all of which made this fantastic resource possible. Cheers! - The Stack Exchange Team

Coming up next: 2012. Stay tuned.