Spolsky's Software Q-and-A Site

guzzibill writes "Joel Spolsky has announced the beta release of Stack Overflow, intended to be a high-quality source of answers to software questions. Post a software question and watch the answers flow in. Popularity voting is very much woven into the site, where both questions and answers can be edited for clarity and voted up or down for correctness. Correctly posed questions and insightful answers float to the top. This site has reached critical mass." From Joel's description, he was envisioning a source of technical Q&A about programming. So far, many of the questions are broader and less technical, such as advice on the best book about software development. It will be interesting to see where the community that's forming takes it.

Expert sex change, again?

[Cyberax (705495)]

Would it be any different from expertsexchange.com?

I.e. is it going to be _really_ useful?

Re:

[DeadDecoy (877617)]

It looks like it's free ... and the layout is a bit ugly.

Re:Expert sex change, again?

[lysergic.acid (845423)]

i prefer ugly and functional over pretty but unusable any day.

the fact that it doesn't require a paid subscription and implements collaborative editing already puts it way ahead of the competition.

all that's left to do is to promote the site properly and build up a healthy community of knowledgeable users.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

Shh, don't tell anyone, but "Expert sex change" IS free, you need to scroll way way way way way way way way down past the answers that seem to make you have to register and login, and past the intentionally boring nonsense, and then you'll find the same responses but this time the complete answers are there. Presumably the site is designed that way to get it googled while still making it seem as though you need to register.

Re:Expert sex change, again?

[kat_skan (5219)]

Whoops, except I meant userContent.css of course. As a mea culpa, here's a version that also takes out their 7-day trial banner and some links to other random crap, and that won't affect other sites that happen to use the same class names for something.

@-moz-document domain(experts-exchange.com) {
.blurredAnswer, .allZonesMain, .qStats, .squareSignUp,
.relatedSolutions, .relatedSolutionsContainer, .lightImage,
.startFreeTrial {
display: none !important;
}
}

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

Knowledgeable programmers don't hang around sites like Experts Exchange or Stack Overflow answering newbie questions. They read sites like arxiv and LtU and subscribe to groups and mailing lists specific to their interests.

This site has no chance of getting expert programmers to hang around long because it doesn't foster discussion on topics that are interesting to experts. At best you'll get mediocre programmers answering relatively basic questions. Look at the questions and answers on the first few pag

Re:Expert sex change, again?

[PaladinAlpha (645879)]

It was at this -- and only until this -- point in the comment list that I realized it was ExpertsExchange.com and not ExpertSexChange.com. I was having serious trouble reconciling the relevance.

Correction in terminology

[SuperKendall (25149)]

Knowledgeable programmers don't hang around sites like Experts Exchange or Stack Overflow answering newbie questions.

I think rather than saying "Knwledgeable Programmers" you meant to say "assholes".

Because the experts I knw are happy to help newbies on occasion. And the reason you'd otherwise hang around stack overflow at other times is to see the more interesting and difficult questions, and answers. And to develop a public reputation for expertise. So at any time there is a helthy enough set of exper

Re:Correction in terminology

[lysergic.acid (845423)]

i would also add that teaching others is one of the best ways to teach yourself.

while i'm not a math wiz by any means (got a C in AP Calculus--though i did pass the AP test with a 5), i was involved in an after-school library tutoring program my junior and senior year. this was an excellent program, not only because it was a great resource for struggling students, but also because it was a great learning experience for the student tutors as well.

tutoring other students is a great way to review old knowledge, and sometimes you even learn alongside the students as you try to help them understand difficult concepts. there's no better way to gain a genuine grasp on challenging material than having to explain it to someone else. it really challenges you to look at, analyze, and break down difficult concepts in new ways in order to convey the concept to the person you're tutoring. and in this process, you yourself also become much more familiar with and gain a better understanding of the material.

Re:

[mweather (1089505)]

expertsexchange.com is also free. Just block their cookies.

Re:

[nawcom (941663)]

it's called stack overflow and people expect it to look pretty? Personally, I would expect the site to look like the Cobol on Cogs [coboloncogs.org] site with a name like that.

I hate the Yahoo Answers site, and this looks like its going to be a version of that for computer related questions.

"Best subversion client for Mac OS? [stackoverflow.com]"
(how bout svn you dope)

"What is the single most effective way to keep from getting Slashdotted [stackoverflow.com]"
(I won't even comment on this)

Personally I can't wait until the relationship questions come up. "How do

Re:

[jgc7 (910200)]

Ugly... is only part of the problem. Joel is a master at screwing up usability. I think his project managment system still includes a random photo of the day.

If you are making a question and answer site, why would you make the questions and answers the least prominent thing on every page?

A fixed width site? You have got to be kidding me. We are developers with 30" monitors.

Re:

[goose-incarnated (1145029)]

It won't become what Joel wants it to become, reason being it requires openID. You want community support? Then allow people without openid to create an account - requiring someone to click through 2 different domains and a total of 6 pages (+-) just to create an account borders on stupidity.

Re:Expert sex change, again?

[Mascot (120795)]

Valid point. I did scratch my chin over that one for a few seconds. Then clicked "learn more" and discovered I already had accounts with at least four of the listed sites. I just picked one and that was it.

Re:Expert sex change, again?

[Ortega-Starfire (930563)]

Uh, they put the dash in the url for a reason.

www.experts-exchange.com

You probably don't want to go to expertsexchange.com

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

It's better than going to amateursexhange.com.

Re:

[oldspewey (1303305)]

You probably don't want to go to expertsexchange.com

It's better than going to amateursexhange.com.

Either way, if you wake up all groggy in a Bangkok hospital with extensive bandages and local anesthetic from the waist down, you're probably about to have a very, very bad day.

Far more useful

[SuperKendall (25149)]

Content s not hidden behind a gated wall, and is community edited - by responsible community members, in that there are complex rules around who can edit what to keep things open but still controlled from random vandalism.

In addition, despite the layout being sort of ugly, it has a really great feature - badges. These are Trophies or Achivements, that make it fun to keep using the site and reward you for improving things in various way.

Even just in the beta period there were a lot of pretty good questions and answers. It's harder to see that now that the general public is in but there still are good questions and informative answers, and searches should yield some pretty useful results there.

Re:Expert sex change, again?

[sootman (158191)]

That's his goal. (To be useful, not to be like EE.) Joel has written about the development of S-O several times on his site and mentions this almost every time. From the most recent post: [joelonsoftware.com]

You know what drives me crazy? Programmer Q&A websites. You know what I'm talking about. You type a very specific programming question into Google and you get back:

• A bunch of links to discussion forums where very unknowledgeable people are struggling with the same problem and getting nowhere,
• A link to a Q&A site that purports to have the answer, but when you get there, the answer is all encrypted, and you're being asked to sign up for a paid subscription plan,
• An old Usenet post with the exact right answer--for Windows 3.1--but it just doesn't work anymore,
• And something in Japanese.

If you're very lucky, on the fourth page of the search results, if you have the patience, you find a seven-page discussion with hundreds of replies, of which 25% are spam advertisements posted by bots trying to get googlejuice for timeshares in St. Maarten, yet some of the replies are actually useful, and someone whose name is "Anon Y. Moose" has posted a decent answer, grammatically incorrect though it may be, and which contains a devastating security bug, but this little gem is buried amongst a lot of dreck.

Well, technology has gotten better since those discussion forums were set up. I thought that the programming community could do better...

Basically, he (and some others) said "this could be better" so they went ahead and made it. And no, he is absolutely 100% against experts-exchange style trickery. He just saw a need he wanted to fill, saw something that he wanted to exist so he made it. He's got the money to run it ad-free forever.

high quality?

[by Anonymous Coward]

How do they ensure high quality? Meaning, how does this not evolve into just another programming Q/A web forum?

As as aside, the no-registration-required attribute is nice.

Re:high quality?

[Sancho (17056)]

Questions and answers can be rated, so that helps. As your rank increases (by posing good questions and helpful answers) your abilities on the site increase, up to the point where you virtually become a moderator. The algorithm for determining this may need some tweaking--right now, you need 6000 points to achieve the highest rank, and you get 10 points for a being modded up (losing 2 for being modded down.) If it's anything like other moderation systems, a bunch of people will get together to mod each others questions and answers up enough to become Stack Overflow gods.

Not Joel Spolsky's Site

[nmb3000 (741169)]

To be fair, Joel had very little to do with the actual implementation or development of the site. The majority of the credit for the idea and actual creation should go to Jeff Atwood [codinghorror.com] of Coding Horror.

Personally I think it's a great idea, if for no other reason than to put the screws to Expert Sexchange. Their stupid referrer sniffing and page layout designed to make people pay to see answers has gone on long enough.

Re:

[catfood (40112)]

A-freaking-men. I don't understand why Google keeps ranking their results so high.

Re:Not Joel Spolsky's Site

[CodeBuster (516420)]

If Google is ranking them highly then they are either paying ExpertExchange for robot access (doubt it) or ExpertExchange is engaging in a form of cloaking [wikipedia.org] (i.e. pay or you cannot see what the search engine saw without paying), which I thought the Google page rank algorithm penalized because it is frequently a sign of black-hat SEO. I agree that subscription only sites should be identified as such in the Google search results, although most of us know by now that ExpertExchange charges for answers and avoid it for that reason anyway. I don't dispute their right to charge for answers, but why should I pay them when I can usually find the same information for free unless it is very specific or obscure?

Initial thoughts

[Bogtha (906264)]

I've been using it for the past day or so, and although there are lots of decent questions, there are also a lot of people who post things that could easily be answered by with Google or RTFM, a lot of students posting homework questions (and getting answers!), and a lot of people posting bad code as answers. Time will tell whether they can build a community that can resolve these problems, but in my experience, the quality of these types of communities only goes down.

Re:Initial thoughts

[DeadDecoy (877617)]

Maybe they just need a way to (meta)moderate the questions based on views and whether it's been solved or not. They should also have a filter for stupid homework questions, e.g. How to check if the given string is palindrome? Also, questions should have a 'solved' or 'pending' tag like a bugs section instead of 'answers', which is simply a chain of replies. This way they could bury the more naive attempts at solving homework and get to the more difficult and interesting problems like writing drivers for linux : ).

Re:Initial thoughts

[JPLemme (106723)]

There's a "Homework" tag, and anyone with enough rank to tag questions can apply it (even if the student didn't.)

As for the GP's point, if SO wants to become the source of all good bits it would *need* to duplicate the questions that can be easily Googled so that it has all of the answers. A lot of the information on Wikipedia could have been Googled as well, but the people who added that info added value to Wikipedia regardless.

Re:

[JPLemme (106723)]

I don't disagree with you, but there's a category of questions between your two examples which is (I think) where SO is aimed. API references sometimes tell you everything /except/ how to use a function (or at least they don't cover more than one or two standard cases). And your second question would be more suitable for SO phrased as "how can I stop Firefox from doing [x]".

I'm still on the fence as to whether their concept will work or not. I've gotten a couple of excellent answers to very specific questio

important programming question

[Trailer Trash (60756)]

vim or emacs? Has anyone asked *that* yet?

Re:

[martinw89 (1229324)]

OK, I'll ask.

Why is vim so much better than emacs??

Nice /-vertisement

[mcmonkey (96054)]

But really, what's the point? What do I get from this site I can't find with usenet and Google groups?

With the issue of researching a question regarding foo v3 and getting burried with out of date data on foo v1, what is being done here to resolve that issue?

For the moment I expect the site to have details of the latest and greatest, but only because it is a new site. If it lasts a few years, it will be full of the same stale information as other sites.

Will they remove any questions/responses regarding ol

Editing will keep it up-to-date

[Nerdposeur (910128)]

For the moment I expect the site to have details of the latest and greatest, but only because it is a new site. If it lasts a few years, it will be full of the same stale information as other sites.

Nope. You didn't RTFA. It has Wikipedia-like editing of questions and answers. If you get enough reputation in the site, you can edit and update things as needed.

Re:Editing will keep it up-to-date

[topham (32406)]

Have you ever looked at the C FAQ? It's full of exceptionally useful information and tips but no beginners can comprehend it.
This will turn into the same thing. Absolute declarations of: You must do it -this- way, followed by an explanation only the converted can understand.

What idiot designed the input formatting?

[Animats (122034)]

"to linebreak use 2 spaces at end"

Who ordered that? That's a huge headache if you want to paste in something.

Reputation System

[Nerdposeur (910128)]

I think the most interesting thing about StackOverFlow is the reputation system. The more good questions and answer you create, the more power you get. From the FAQ:

Here's how it works: if you post a good question or helpful answer, it will be voted up by your peers. If you post something that's off topic or incorrect, it will be voted down. Each up vote adds 10 reputation points; each down vote removes 2. Amass enough reputation points and Stack Overflow will allow you to do more things on the site, beyond simply asking and answering questions, such as:

15 - Vote up
15 - Flag offensive
50 - Leave comments
100 - Vote down
250 - Close your questions (no longer accept answers)
500 - Retag other people's questions
750 - Edit community wiki posts
2000 - Edit other people's posts
2000 - Delete comments
3000 - Close other people's questions

At the high end of this reputation spectrum there is little difference between users with high reputation and moderators. That is very much intentional. We don't run Stack Overflow. The community does.

Re:

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

At the high end of this reputation spectrum there is little difference between users with high reputation and moderators. That is very much intentional. We don't run Stack Overflow. The community does.

I have one word for Stack Overflow: Cliques

Teenagers with too much time on their hands will kill this thing in a week unless they adjust their scheme.

Re:

[Nerdposeur (910128)]

That's possible, but the site has been in beta for a while, and bored people have been trying to manipulate it already. They've put a lot of mechanisms in place to encourage good behavior, and hopefully community monitoring will continue to stop this.

What you're saying should be pretty easy to detect, right? Like, these 10 people all post crappy answers and vote each other's crappy answers up? Those users could be penalized, and meanwhile, if the answers are truly crappy, other people can be voting them dow

Re:

[autophile (640621)]

If you post something that's off topic or incorrect, it will be voted down. Each up vote adds 10 reputation points; each down vote removes 2. Amass enough reputation points and Stack Overflow will allow you to do more things on the site

Great. Level grinding :(

Knowledge RPG?

[Arc the Daft (1340487)]

I'll probably get downmodded for admitting I bought Spore, but the similarities between Stackoverflow's achievements and the space stage of Spore are uncanny.

Like many sites, you are given geek powers the more you use the sight and the more helpful you are, ultimately giving you lots of mod powers. Addictive, but will the people that attain the powers use them for good?

Only time will tell...

Re:Knowledge RPG?

[77Punker (673758)]

It'll be like Slashdot; people will post good comments until they have good karma and then use the good karma to troll.

Faggot.

I was a beta tester

[jerbenn (903795)]

The site is now out of beta. I was one of the original beta testers and I can attest that this application is truly revolutionary from the other BBS/Q&A sites that exist out there. First off, it is totally free. Secondly, all of the stupid answers and questions get voted down and disappear very quickly. (Like the guy wanting you to "send me teh codez for class assignment"). Thirdly, the user interface is superb for a web-based app as well as the search functionality. It takes all of the new fangled web features and combines them into this site. You can even get 'badges' sort of like slashdot karma. Way to go Jeff and Joel!

And devshed?

[ducomputergeek (595742)]

I've used Devshed for more than a decade. Usually I've been able to at least find people to point me in the right direction. Okay, layout and ads are a pain, but it's free.

Quick, but wrong

[Animats (122034)]

I asked a moderately hard Perl question (there's a problem in Date::Manip that seems to be configuration dependent), and within two minutes, I had a wrong answer. No useful replies yet.

Re:Stack Overflow

[religious freak (1005821)]

Answers sites are extremely useful when trying to figure out relationships between two things which may not be easily translatable into a concise search query. They're also really handy when you're not quite sure what your question is - and someone else is gracious enough to solidify the thought and answer it.

I'm a big fan of yahoo answers, and I'd love to have a free site for in-depth tech stuff like this. (I've never ponied up the money for experts-exchange)

Re:

[coryking (104614)]

Has *anybody* paid money for expertsexchange?

I'm always in amazement that they still manage to be indexed by Google.

Re:Stack Overflow

[moderatorrater (1095745)]

Easy. Post a coding question, such as "how can I write a query to do x when the tables are y and z?" or "I've got this piece of code, and it's doing x when I want it to do y", or even "I need some obscure functionality with the win32 api. how can I do this?" You know, the same thing people used experts exchange for, only now it's free.

Re:Example...

[Ethanol-fueled (1125189)]

Which is better? i++ or i+1?

It's i=i+1 or i+=1 you idiot! Who's the muthafuckin' genuis NOW?!

Re:Example...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul (629286)]

Semi-Column? I don't know if anyone should be taking the advice of a moran that doesn't know how to spell 'semicolon'.

This hasn't stopped you...

[nobodyman (90587)]

...from posting on slashdot.

Seriously, looks aren't everything. In fact, unless the content is compelling enough even the prettiest design won't keep people coming back. Look at sites like craigslist.

And it's not like their competition (experts-exchange) is setting the aesthetic bar that high, ya know?

Re:

[nobodyman (90587)]

True that. Idle is like Slashdot's answer to Matrix Reloaded: the original is great and we all agree that the other does not exist.