The Stack Overflow Podcast

The podcast is on the road again this week, with Jeff and Joel coming to you live from Jeff's living room in El Cerrito, CA.  They're also joined by Josh Heyer (aka Shog9) who calls in from Colorado.  This is actually the second time we've done a podcast from Jeff's house, the first time being Episode #51.

Server Fault and Super User have recently seen a substantial hit in the amount of traffic coming from Google the last few weeks.  There's a number of possible reasons, but Joel wonders if it has to do with long clicks vs short clicks.

Joel's theory is that Google is looking at this ratio as a signal for the quality of a site: high quality sites should have more long clicks (meaning you don't return to Google quickly) and fewer short clicks (where you click a link and then immediately return to the search page).

We're also wondering if the Google algorithm change is penalizing sysadmin content - since a number of other sites focused on System Administrators / IT Professionals have also seen big drops in traffic from Google.

Jeff previously blogged about Google algorithm issues and the fundamental risks of any site relying on a single source for so much of their traffic.

If you have any data or observations from running your sites, make sure to hop over to our webmasters.stackexchange question on this topic.

Our guest today is Josh Heyer, our new part-time community manager.  Josh was originally on Usenet, then moved to forums and Code Project, and joined Stack Overflow right after it launched; he's been with us from the beginning.

One of the first things that Josh pushed to change after joining the team was to make it more clear why accounts were being suspended.  Someone would get suspended and then complain about it publicly; they had a reason, but other people didn't. This sometimes led to lots of heat and noise on meta, detracting from the quality of the site.  By making the reason for a suspensions public, you remove the gossiping and public discussion.  And if you don't -- you get the Streisand effect.

We're now tackling the last of the low hanging fruit in making the site performance better: serving static content using a CDN.  By utilizing a CDN for lower priority/static content (like logos and other images) we can serve files faster to different areas of the world.

Make sure to hop over to that blog post and help us (and you!) out by telling us which CDN works best for you.

We've been using our own home-brew CDN-like setup that offloads all of our static content off the main servers (to reduce CPU loads) and onto a side domain.  Unfortunately, these secondary servers were still located in our NY data center, so it did not do anything to reduce ping times to distant locations.

In our experience, breaking your static content off onto its own server can have a huge performance benefit, even for small or medium sites.

It's amazing how many highly technical people don't think to clear their browser cache when they're having a problem with a website loading.  Always clear your browser cache and try again before contacting a site's support team. Please?

We started a logo contest for Lucene.net, the open source project powering our search.  If you want to help out by trying your hand at designing a logo for this project, check out the 99designs contest we created on their behalf.

Because our search currently focuses on relevance (determined by keyword mentions), we recommend editing good questions to make sure a proper set of keywords appear in them; this makes it easier for others to find these questions in search.

Remember that search results have several tabs, but always defaults to relevance. Try the votes, active, and other tabs to get a different sort of your search results.

Currently, there's no way for anonymous users to indicate their satisfaction with a page -- should we add something to allow drive-by visitors to contribute? There's always anonymous editi...

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #04 w/ Jon Skeet by The Stack Overflow Podcast

This week, the Stack Exchange podcast travels to England, where Jeff and Joel are joined by Stack Overflow legend Jon Skeet (and son!) along with Marc Gravell.

Picking up the discussion from last week's episode: what constitutes a good question? Our very own "How to Ask" page is a start -- and it's a mandatory page on Stack Overflow for all new askers. It's partially based on Jon's own post, Writing the Perfect Question.

Why should you downvote a question? Is there such a thing as a bad question? There most certainly is! We generally tend to consider questions where the asker put virtually zero effort into asking worthy of a downvote. Jon has also written a bit about reasons for voting on questions and answers. Two of the most important aspects of a good question, per Jon, are providing evidence that you've researched the problem yourself, and providing as much information as possible: detailed code snippets, error messages, objectives, etc.

Some users don't want to answer questions by users with low accept rates. Jon deeply disapproves of the practice of leaving comments nagging users about their accept rate, especially since you can gain far more reputation by writing good answers that are highly upvoted rather than ones that are accepted.

Accept rate by itself doesn't capture all of the information about how good (or bad) a member of the community a given user is. Perhaps accept rate could be expanded into a broader numeric metric of how "civic minded" a user is.

Only two things keep Jeff up at night: the size of the constantly growing database, and maintaining quality within the community. We absolutely want a friendly and civil atmosphere, but as the site grows, people have to learn to follow the norms and guidelines of the site themselves without manual hand holding. It doesn't scale. Ultimately, we can't save every user, and some have to be turned away from the site in order to protect the overall quality of the community. You must give a little to get.

To maintain quality, we started capping the number of questions that can be asked by a user in a given time period. If users are submitting more than 6 questions a day, or more than 50 questions a month ... are they really putting the appropriate amount of research effort into their questions?

Jon wonders if there are algorithmic solutions to detect users asking low quality questions - similar to how GMail reminds you when you reference an attached document in your email, but forget to actually attach something.  Jeff responds that we already do that for answers, and are beginning to aggressively extend it to questions.

Following up on the previous conversations about improved flagging tools -- we get hundreds of flags per day, and the vast majority of them are valid. (Comment flags ... not so much). Even though we're buried in them at the moment, we welcome flags from the community because nearly every one goes directly towards a better signal-to-noise quality ratio on your site. So keep 'em coming!

Jon wonders whether the quality of answers is increasing or declining.  Jeff and Joel respond that not only are the percentage of answered questions increasing but that answer quality, to their knowledge, has never been disputed. It's fundamentally easier to preserve the answer experience than the question experience because users love to vote on answers: good answers go to the top, bad answers to the bottom.  But the flow of incoming questions -- which make up the entirety of the front page and the top 25% of every question page -- have a hugely disproportionate effect on any Q&A system; that's why we spend so much time focusing on them.

The main issues we see with answers isn't quality per se, but that people misuse the answer field to enter thank yous, pleas for help, and other irrelevancies. We do provide the How to Answer page which is automatically shown when we detect such answers.

The Stack Exchange workflow isn't nec...

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #03 w/ Scott Hanselman by The Stack Overflow Podcast

This week, Jeff and Joel are joined by Scott Hanselman - tune in for their discussion of everything from MIX11 to the salads at Jack in the Box.

Welcome Scott Hanselman! Be sure to check out both of Scott's excellent podcasts at Hanselminutes and This Developer's Life.

Joel recently wrote an unintentionally controversial blog post about lunch and how important it is here at Stack Exchange and Fog Creek. Despite the claims that Joel is torturing introverts by forcing them to eat lunch together, the truth is that almost everyone at both companies is introverted and yet enjoy lunch together.

Scott wonders how so many people have so much time to sit around on Hacker News and Reddit (and everywhere else) discussing these blog posts when they have work to do. Of course we have to reference Clay Shirky's classic Gin, Television, and Social Surplus here.

Scott is busy putting together a new Synology DiskStation DS1511+ to replace his Windows Home Server setup - unfortunately, there's a lot of options (and a lot of bad ones out there). Scott is a wired enthusiast, but he does like his optimized wireless N setup, which is based on a Netgear N600.

Microsoft has an amazing video conferencing system known as RoundTable -- now branded as the Polycom CX5000 -- that captures the room in 360 degrees and then automatically detects and shows the person who is talking. Scott also has a mobile remote telepresence device running around Redmond as him, somewhere. He also recommends the Cisco Umi.

Over on mechanics.stackexchange.com, Jeff wonders why online car communities are so brand-centric -- there are hundreds of dedicated sites for Ford enthusiasts, and Subaru enthusiasts, and so forth. Whereas programmers can have Java and Python installed side by side on the same PC, you have to own a lot of physical, real world vehicles to have experience with many different car brands -- or, be an auto mechanic. Perhaps programmers are kinda-sorta mechanics in the sense that they spend most of their time practicing the noble art of maintenance programming.

Stack Exchange sites do well in professions where you can open a relevant Stack Exchange site in a window side-by-side with the work you're already doing on the computer. But what about people who don't regularly work on computers? Is it realistic to expect people who tend to work offline to take the time and effort to come online after they finish working and keep discussing their work? Or, will the proliferation of computing devices like smartphones and tablets bring the online world to them while they work? It does happen, since diy.stackexchange.com is clearly an offline site but produces a lot of really high quality questions and answers about home improvement.

We've improved flagging dramatically on Stack Exchange over the last few months. You may have noticed a public flag weight value on some user profiles. Your flags now carry different weight depending on how accurate and helpful your flags have been in the past ... and the more you successfully flag, the more daily flags you'll get, in a sort of virtuous cycle.

Scott asks: why should I care about all these points and flags and badges and reputation systems on Stack Exchange? What's the point of you guys building your own Dungeons and Dragons MMORPG system online?

Tune in to next week's podcast when Joel will be "live" from London and our guest will be the infamous Jon Skeet!

Also, if you're interested in helping us pick content for Stack Overflow Dev Days - check out Joel's post on it.

This week on the Stack Exchange podcast, Jeff and Joel are back into the swing of the weekly podcast and jump right into business, including:

The algorithm for the Stack Overflow homepage changed a little while back, showing you even more relevant content and questions every time you log in.

Content farms and how much they suck (but how amazingly funny and well written "The Content Farm" is.

The recent launch of the HowThingsWork Stack Exchange and why it never made it out of its private beta.  In particular, it had the issue that it would have turned into almost just another content farm and not fulfill the Stack Exchange mission of making the internet better.

The recent move to our new data center and technical changes that have made all of the sites faster and more efficient.

How you can utilize improved networking in your data center to greatly improve performance with efficient upgrades

The Internet Archive is an amazing service for preserving the history of the internet, but it never seems to get enough support.  Go and donate today!

Is there such a thing as a question that is too simple?  What new guidelines should we give people when posting questions on Stack Exchange.

And a fun fact about the Stack Exchange podcast: We have listeners in 85 countries around the world.

See you next week when Jeff and Joel are joined by Scott Hanselman.

One final note - we're re-numbering the podcast to start back at the beginning, so this is now episode #02 and last week is now episode #01.

Welcome back to the first episode of the new Stack Exchange Podcast redux!  Jumping right back into the old groove, here's what happens this week:

Jeff and Joel discuss missing the openness that the old podcast provided.  Since the podcast is just a recording of their weekly call, it gives listeners an insight into the decision making and vision behind Stack Exchange.

Some of the Stack Exchange metas have been having vibrant debates and discussions about the role of the community and moderators in shaping debates - but what are the unseen upsides to having this vibrant meta community?

Joel has spent many hours over the last few weeks looking at user trends and patterns between the Stack Exchange sites - what has he found?

The percentage of "civilians" (users whose first login was to a site other than StackOverflow, SuperUser or ServerFault) on Stack Exchange sites has grown to 36% since the launch of SE.

* However, the recent stasis of the ratio not changing isn't due to civilian growth stopping, its that programmers are growing just as quickly.

* Most interestingly, some of the "geekiest" sites (like Ubuntu, Math, Stats, Physics, TeX) have the highest percentage of "civilian" users.

Launching this week is the beta of the brand new HowThingsWork community.  Jeff and Joel discuss its odds for success, challenges it faces, and lessons learned from the launches of past communities.

There have been numerous discussionsover the last few months about the closing of questions for being "too localized" - Joel and Jeff discuss their (strong) feelings on how and when this should be used and why you shouldn't ask about why there's a pothole outside your house but you should ask why cities have so much trouble maintaining their roads in general.

Plus, did someone successfully troll Joel on this thread?

Coming up in September and October this year: it's Stack Overflow Dev Days 2011!  We'll be doing Dev Days in fewer spots this time (4 instead of 10) but they'll be bigger and better - plus running for two days instead of just one.  Dev Days will be taking place in 4 cities around the world, one each somewhere in the US West Coast, US East Coast, UK and Australia.  Stay tuned at the Stack Overflow blog for more details.

Help us out - make sure to let us know what topics you want to see covered

Joel and Jeff discuss their backup procedures and why you need to be careful whether using hard drives or SSDs.  Plus, why you really shouldn't be too concerned that Dropbox will decrypt your data if they receive a court order.

Finally, we're going to have all kinds of interesting and upcoming changes for the podcast including guests, a live stream, a live chat room and maybe even video.

A special thanks to our friends at SoundCloud for setting us up on their amazing audio sharing platform - you can check out this episode on their site or below (and even leave comments at specific times during the audio).

Also, a big thanks to Friend of George over on audio.stackexchange.com for the recommendation on live recording software that we're using for the podcast now.

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #02 by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #01 by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Overflow Podcast - Episode #87 by The Stack Overflow Podcast