November 15, 2013. 6:30AM UTC. Community Manager Grace Note posted How is Code Review doing right now?.
#We are 100+ days later.
##Rewind
Since mid-November 2013, a number of things have happened:
- A fun tag was created on Meta-CR.
- CR users answered the Call of Duty; incoming, as well as mummified and even some fossilized zombies keep getting shot at every day.
- weekend-challenge marked each weekend of at least the first half of December.
- Winter Bash 2013 was a very successful event that marked the rest of December.
- Over 5.7K stars were spent on over 3,300 starred posts in The 2nd Monitor, the name that was given to our site's main chatroom.
- Stack Exchange Data Explorer made beta sites' data available for some serious querying.
- A picture is worth 1000 words:
(2014-02-25 2:30AM UTC)
###Let's look at the past 15 weeks:
Let's take Stack Overflow as a reference for activity:
This is ours:
Zoom in on the past 15 weeks:
- Question and Answer voting immediately went straight up, and dipped for the Holidays, but never went anywhere near below where it was.
- Two users racing for a [badge:electorate] has had a visible impact on the Question votes, but since a monkey won the race on Jan.27, Question votes have gone down a bit, but remains above 1K.
- New users is on a steadily ascending slope.
##Voting and Reputation Issues
One of the key points of our review was the voting issues:
Voting is an odd beast here. When we reviewed the site, the front page had a dearth of voting. Even looking now, in the last 100 questions asked and the last 100 answers posted, less than 10 of each have scores past 3 with several negatively rated. Now, there are users who vote - vote a lot in fact, as most of the top users have hundreds of votes under their belts (with decent downvote rates as well). But in spite of this, there’s still a humongous bed of users sitting in the ~100-200 reputation range and not actually in the major privilege levels. So for where-ever all the votes are going, it ain’t accumulating.
At the time of this writing, the last 100 questions asked on SEDE have these scores:
- 50 have a score greater than or equal to 3.
- 1 has double-digits upvotes.
- 2 have a negative score.
Last 100 answers posted:
- 42 have a score greater than or equal to 3.
- 3 have double-digits upvotes.
- 1 has a negative score.
I realize this is out-of-sync, ..but we're definitely in another ball park. Let's look at reputation scores.
The inner ring represents the distribution of reputation scores of avid users around November 25, 2013; the inner-middle ring represents the same figures as of Jan.16; the outer-middle ring represents the same figures as of Feb.16, and the outer ring is as of Mar.16:
In this conversation, Grace Note noted that "For separate percentages, you have 51% sitting in 150-200, 38% in 200-500, and 6% in 500-1000. That leaves 5% for everyone above 1000."
Page 1 of users page, reputation tab, all-time, ranges between 19.6K and 3.2K. Page 2 is still above 1.5K, page 3 is still above 1K; the distribution of active high-reputation users is starting to look like something. Voters? We have 2 pages for the month.
##Time to Answer
In mid-November, the average time for a question to receive its first answer was somewhere between 8 and 10 hours.
Following the CodeReview Zombie meme, if you divide the answers on CodeReview in to two groups:
- Answers for questions that were younger than a day old (when answered)
- Answers for questions that were older than a day old (when answered)
The second group are a loose definition of Zombie Kills. There are two sides to our progress...
- keeping on top of new questions coming in
- clearing out the backlog of old unanswered questions.
This graph shows the activity in these two areas, :

It shows the nice red line, which is the number of questions per week that get answered within a day.
The 10's of zombies is the curve that shows the steady increase in unanswered questions, until mid November, when the zombie-cull commenced.
These two metrics clearly show how the zombies are being brought back under control, while still maintaining quality answers in good time for the new questions coming in.
##Unanswered
One of the most pressing issues with the site was the gigantic pool of unanswered questions. CR was then at around 88% answered, with > 1K questions with no upvoted answers. At the time of this writing, CR is at around 95% answered, with 663 unanswered and 673 with no upvoted answers.
What's the question, you'll ask?
Are we there, yet?




