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.

Not Joel Spolsky's Site

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:Not Joel Spolsky's Site

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

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

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

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.

important programming question

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

Reputation System

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.

I was a beta tester

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?

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

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:Expert sex change, again?

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

Far more useful

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?

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.

Re:Expert sex change, again?

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:Expert sex change, again?

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:Expert sex change, again?

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.

Re:Correction in terminology

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:Expert sex change, again?

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:Stack Overflow

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:Stack Overflow

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...

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

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

Re:Editing will keep it up-to-date

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.

Re:high quality?

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.

This hasn't stopped you...

...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:Knowledge RPG?

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

Faggot.