Stack Exchange was built around two things that made it valuable: getting good answers to questions and interacting with a community of people who shared knowledge and interests. Both seem to be under pressure now, but for very different reasons. AI is making the traditional Q&A model less distinctive. A user can often obtain an immediate answer without asking a question on a public platform,…
Lately, whenever I've tried to archive a question in the Wayback Machine, the Cloudflare security-verification process's been blocking the attempt : Given that any negative impact on the Wayback Machine's ability to archive SE pages is officially considered a bug , I assume this blocking is accidental. Not a dupe of my prior question about Cloudflare blocking the Wayback Machine , as the blocking…
I'm working on a transportation booking system for New York and I'm trying to build a dynamic fare estimator for different pickup and drop-off locations. The application needs to calculate the driving distance and estimated travel time between two addresses using a distance matrix or routing API. Based on the returned distance, I then want to apply different pricing rules for a private car or limo…
On Linux (fedora 44) : Since recently (haven't tried in several weeks, noticed it today): (Linux) Firefox (latest version, 153.0.3 (64 bit) on fedora 44) : can not display most of the pages of stackexchange.com : unix.stackexchange.com : ok, but ko for all /questions/... urls. stackoverflow.com/ : gets redirected to https://stackoverflow.com/questions and is ko askubuntu.com : ok, but every…
I typically expect anchors to have the pointer cursor when hovered over (if I understand correctly, it's supposed to be the default for anchors). I was surprised to notice that they are rendering default when hovered over instead of pointer . I have vague recollection that they used to use pointer . It looks like it's the .s-btn.s-btn__unset, .s-btn.s-btn__unset:hover, .s-btn.s-btn__unset:active,…
AI-assisted answering is generally restricted or banned on SE ( or is it SO? ) sites. This makes sense. However, some questioners say that they web-searched their problem and then report that the "[search engine] AI said..." then quoting or summarizing the AI-generated entry from their search. I see this as an equivalent of "I web-searched, and this is what I found..." that we probably saw a lot…
The HNQ layout on mobile devices is broken on the Stack Exchange.com homepage . The featured site and other things like the user list are shown below the question list. I have no idea whether this is intentional or not. Only staff would know. But, this was not the previous behavior. Some reasons the new layout may not be optimal or may be a bug: the widths of the columns are not actually expanded…
As Stack Exchange ages and community are evolving towards more AI dependent mindsets (humans rely more on AI for problem-solving or decision-making), we should reward the healthy removal of obsolete sites or tags. Some feature requests started on 2010, old inactive projects, dead mobile apps chats, etc. collect dust…
Starting a couple of days or weeks ago, for some user avatars on all Stack Exchange sites, only the alt text shows. This included my own, until I changed my profile settings to use Gravatar instead of a manually uploaded picture file. After I changed that, I can see my own avatar in all places I should see it, but some other users' avatars are still broken. This could be Stack Exchange itself…
I am building a House for MSFS Flightsimulator and using Blender 4.5.1 LTS What I want to do is to making doors in and windows in the wall using extrude and duplicates of vertices and also options automerge vertices and also options "Split edges and faces". I have worked this way all days and it always have worked in 3.6 LTS that I used before. But I do not understand why I got this Confusing…
I've noticed that when a suggested edit is rejected, the feedback is often quite brief and doesn't always help the contributor understand what could have been improved. While experienced users may already know the expectations, newer contributors can find the process confusing. Has there been any discussion about providing more detailed rejection reasons or examples of acceptable edits? My…
My flair has a completely wrong profile picture: I swapped my profile picture once, from the identicon to my current crown , back in 2020. I have not changed it since. I definitely haven't changed it to whoever this man is. Other flairs look OK to me, e.g. an SO mod election and a Puzzling mod election . I've checked Meta as well, where the Flair section of my profile page has no images instead of…
Occasionally people post text that contains bullet lists indicated by Unicode bullet characters (U+2022, decimal 8226). These don't render properly as bullet lists, so someone has to edit them to replace the • with - or * (I did this most recently in Why so little discussion of philosophers of the Islamic golden age? , although in this case there also was no space after the bullets). Could the…
I wonder how the number of active users has evolved over the years across the Stack Exchange network. I am aware of: SEDE query: Number of new users created per year SEDE query: Number of new users created per day https://stackexchange.com/sites used to have the number of active users but Stack Exchange removed a while ago. How has the number of monthly active users (MAUs) across the Stack…
It is obvious that something is not quite adding up. In response to the seemingly endless announcements of new changes, which in any other situation might be expected to be met with acceptance, enthusiasm and relief at the prospect of improvement, the reaction has been very different from what might have been expected — at least visually, and from the outside. There are situations where change…
The style guide ( https://stackoverflow.design/copy/naming ) says that the phrase "Stack Overflow" will be restricted to refer to the company qua company, or to "the public Q&A platform." It is clear from context, given the examples, this means "the public Q&A platform at stackoverflow.com." To refer to the broader complete network of sites, the company says it will use the noun "Stack Overflow…
If you’ve been following along, we’ve been moving through a brand update over the last year. As we covered previously , Stack Overflow is now the name for the whole network. If you've been here long enough to feel like ‘Stack Exchange’ is the right name for this place, that's not wrong; it's what this network was called for most of its life. What's changing is how we refer to it going forward, not…
In the comments, you can use `\`` to escape a (code formatted) backtick, like so: resulting in However, in question (and answer) posts, it doesn't work. It ends up looking like three backticks: ```. To get what you want you have to use <code>...</code> , or least that is how I worked around the issue: <code>`</code> which gives: `
I can’t seem to understand what is wrong with the following Markdown content. I keep getting the Your post appears to contain code that is not properly formatted as code. Please indent all code by 4 spaces using the code toolbar button or the CTRL+K keyboard shortcut. For more editing help, click the [?] toolbar icon. My Markdown content looks like this: I'm solving this IDDFS-based problem where…
To provide context (again): For a long while, there's been a feature where users who request deletion of their accounts and meet certain criteria for low activity (currently, not having posted on the site in the past) have their account deleted immediately, rather than having their account's deletion scheduled for 24 hours after they make the request. Additionally, there's a feature where users…
I cannot find these strings using Transifex: (name hidden from user) Regards, {site name} Moderation Team This string does appear in Transifex and it seems like this string does not work ok (it is translated and approved, but, unfortunately, not rendered on the site). bcc All of the strings are taken from the mod message (Moderator Private Message) interface. Could you please fix these issues?
We knew that the Stack Exchange Network would eventually play a bigger role in contributing to the financial end of our business, but we didn't know how long that would take. Turns out, it was roughly six years from the time that we decided to put all of you in charge of the topics that Stack Exchange serves. TL;DR: See the title, and scan this post for a bulleted list of sites that will soon be…
Today I stumbled upon this issue – on one of the question pages at Stack Overflow, it says: asked 1 year ago Yet below the little box says: asked May 3 '12 at 19:02 Correct me if I am wrong, but that doesn't seem right.
I know how to download the latest release of the Stack Exchange Creative Commons Data Dump, but I'm interested in downloading a past release and don't see those listed. Where can I find them?
A user asked for a complex algorithm. I answered in detail , which took me some time. The user then mentioned (politely) in a comment that he would like me to provide code. Writing the code would take me a few weeks of work. What's the etiquette to explain to the user that while I did answer the question I am not going to do his/her job?
From this question I arrived to ChrisJJ's profile and found out that December 22nd, 21:11 is 2 days away from December 23rd, 13:25. The time now is 2013-12-23 13:30:17Z. ( I'm hovering over 2 days, not 12 hours, confirmed the title attribute on the 2 days element ) I also checked this on my tablet yesterday evening (in UTC time) and it listed 2 days back then as well. I couldn't check the tooltip,…
Going through the flagged posts review page in the 10k moderation tools, I was amazed to see that the time displayed for the "joined" field was less than the time displayed for by the answered field. How is this possible? How can a user answer a question before joining Stack Overflow?
I deleted an answer because after further thought, I decided it did not really answer the question. That was two days ago. It's still there! How long do deletes hang in purgatory? Curiously, I can find no mention of undo delete duration in the docs.
Does SO have some sort of cutoff time per day? Is it fixed in one time (e.g. 00:00) or is it related to when you registered? For example, if I registered at exactly 2pm, would the next day 2pm be the cutoff and count as one day when I login? If not, what time is it? Is it applied to all SE Network?
So, we have a literature tag. I don't think we need this. Most of the questions that have it are... not good (a good 33% are closed). And those that are OK probably don't need it. Shall we burn it? Especially since, even after it gets removed, it may well come back.
In chatting, I've taken to using bold to format code. This is because it does not stand out very well if the only thing that changes is a fixed-width font. For instance: But it seems that if CSS were applied to use a fixed width font and change the background color, that would be a better solution. I'm not sure of the entire implications, but here's a test:
Formerly List of all badges with full descriptions . What are badge name 's requirements? Why didn't I get badge name (right now) ? Which badges can I earn multiple times? Jump to: Question Badges Answer Badges Participation Badges Tag Badges Moderation Badges Other Badges Area 51 Badges Documentation Badges (Stack Overflow) Further information Why didn't I get badge name right now? What are…
