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As noted in this post, Coding Challenges will, for now, continue to use the functionality first built for Discussions. The longer-term plans for Challenges are still taking shape, and any questions about that experiment should be asked on that post.

At this time, we do not plan to restore the Discussions experiment on Stack Overflow. We have learned a great deal from the usage of Discussions and feedback about the experiment and the overall concept. While Discussions won’t be coming back in the form you saw in the experiment, we are exploring how we can allow for a broader range of technical conversation and how this content might exist alongside core Q&A, as noted in a recent look at our roadmap.

Observations and feedback from the Comments/Discussions experiment have also been valuable, as well as hearing from community members about potential implementation of a more focused scope for a conversation space. Conversations about the evergreen topic of closed questions have also been very insightful, and are highly relevant to those explorations.

Existing Discussions posts will remain hidden, but they are not being deleted outright, and there is potential for that content to be resurfaced in the future.

We appreciate all the ideas, feedback and community effort around Discussions, with a special shout out to the Discussions Moderators. We look forward to sharing more ideas about the concept in the future.

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    Honestly, it's disappointing that discussions wasn't handled better to start with; I think you, and other users, could have learned more from it had it been better equipped from the start. Commented Aug 19, 2025 at 19:55
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    Hopefully if you learned anything from the experiment, it's that spammers will use any vector they can access and that some combination of posting restrictions and adequate moderation tooling is needed. Given the recent experiments with the comment reputation requirement, I'm not certain that lesson was learned. Commented Aug 19, 2025 at 22:35
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    It's two things in one Q&A here really. One is the sunsetting of discussions, the other is the continuation of code challenges. And the title could be more specific. Commented Aug 20, 2025 at 7:25
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    What I have learned from this website is that I dislike being a test subject. The end of an experiment is very good news! Keep up the good work and end as many experiments as possible! Commented Aug 20, 2025 at 9:22
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    I won't miss the Discussions feature. Chat was built to keep discussions out of the knowledge base, it should continue to be used for discussions. I mean the first thing that happened is that it was abused for followup questions - by design, not because people just felt like doing it. The UI directed them to do it, poorly. Not even the company can contain itself with such a feature around, it immediately became a dumping ground. Commented Aug 20, 2025 at 11:08
  • Can you at least explain, in clear and simple language what the impetus is for adding a coding challenge in the first place? I see no continuity between the SO Q&A model and what "coding challenge" sites are. Why do we want one to begin with? Commented Aug 21, 2025 at 5:46
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    @DavidC.Rankin Why do shops do commercials, events and discounts? To draw in people who will become customers. For Stack Overflow to stay relevant, it will need features that people like. The precious Q&A repository is no longer a main attractor. Commented Aug 21, 2025 at 8:34
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    That's fair, but don't fall into the coding challenge site pitfall of providing crap boilerplate code riddled with improper language shortcuts wholly devoid of proper validation for contestants to start with. We've answered enough questions on SO in that regard. Not to mention the prevailing consensus "Do not use coding challenge sites to learn XYZ language, the sites are littered with bad coding examples and improper language usage." Why not some other event or discount that doesn't have all the negative baggage that goes against what SO stands for? Commented Aug 21, 2025 at 19:12
  • I hate being a Cassandra. Commented Aug 21, 2025 at 21:57
  • I remember logging onto discussions, refreshing the page every few minutes and flagging a ton of posts. Commented Sep 27, 2025 at 4:59

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I'm disappointed in this.

Coding Challenges is a very unique-to-Stack Overflow thing, and it really doesn't fit the overall theme of sharing knowledge and experience. I don't think it can be readily applied across the network, and it may even take away from sites like Code Golf and Coding Challenges Stack Exchange.

Discussions, on the other hand, was poorly launched from the beginning. I didn't participate much, but it was very quickly flooded with low-quality content and didn't have good moderation tools to stop it. However, it could have been an answer to more traditional forum threads that still let people share their knowledge and experience while being integrated with things like tags (for content organization), search (for content discovery), and the SEDE and data dumps (for open access). It's also something that could very easily be applicable across the network and supplement the overall mission.

I do hope that you take the lessons learned here and consider finding more ways to share knowledge outside of the Q&A format, including more discussion-oriented features.

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    I hope they don't. Why can't we just be happy to be the best place for programming Q&A? And by 'we', I mean the user community. The company understandably has different goals. Commented Aug 20, 2025 at 0:09
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    @PresidentJamesK.Polk The company was sold for 1.8billion$ and the high-quality-QA-site alone can never generate revenue to justify that price. Telling SO/SE to stop expanding beyond what it is is a quixotic fight. The best outcome for the QA-community is that QA remains high-quality and further ambitions are launched as separate (optional) things. Commented Aug 20, 2025 at 8:19
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    @PresidentJamesK.Polk I think julaine brings up the right perspective from the company, but as an expert on various topics, I want to be able to engage with other people (experts and non-experts) to share my knowledge. On some sites, the number of new questions is slowing down a lot. Having other venues on the platform would help me continue to use my profile as a sort of portfolio of my knowledge and expertise. Commented Aug 20, 2025 at 10:30
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So discussions is finally almost-dead (let's hope the threatened "resurfacing" will not materialize). That's great! I was waiting for a post like this the second that ill-conceived feature was announced, as its eventual demise was clear from the outset for anyone who paid attention or was here during the SO docs saga. This was again a half-baked implementation of a half-baked idea that was shoehorned into SO against lots of community pushback and while ignoring some great community feedback, which seems to be the best one can expect from SE nowadays. At some point I had hope that the continued failure of these projects would make SE change their approach, but that seems to have been too optimistic.

What I didn't expect is that this misfeature would be sneak-killed by replacing it with "coding challenges" that are so low-tier they make entry level hackit websites from the mid 2000s seem like higher education. With only 10k views for the latest two challenges, these will not have any sort of positive effect on your bottom line, and having the community pitch challenges will not help either - the absolute best outcome I can see would be that you end up with something similar to the existing codegolf and puzzling sites, which is rather pointless; all other outcomes would be worse. So I'd suggest you just cancel those right now instead of spending more resources on it and then cancelling it somewhere in the next 12 months.

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    They have learned the learnings, they hear what we are saying, and they are committed to engineering a visionary rock and a hard place for the company to be stuck in between. Commented Aug 20, 2025 at 8:51
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    @AndrasDeak--СлаваУкраїні that's not really fair though, the rock and a hard place were largely put there by LLMs and code assistants. For a long time the site thrived despite all the ill-fated attempts to do "other stuff", not so anymore. Commented Aug 20, 2025 at 12:35
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    @Gimby disagree, the problem mostly stems from giving SE a 1.8 billion USD valuation and afterwards trying to find a business strategy which justifies that valuation. WIthout that pie-in-the-sky valuation and sale, and with a strategy focusing on simply being a great knowledge repository, SE would have had various avenues to thrive regardless of the existence of bad "coding assistants" (which according to recent studies waste time on average instead of saving it). Which is an entirely homemade problem without any LLM involvement, but maybe it involved some other things causing hallucinations. Commented Aug 20, 2025 at 13:01
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    @Gimby the community tends to give lots of actionable, constructive feedback on all the misfeatures. Many could have been improved to the point of usability. They are actively digging a deeper and deeper hole by constantly sidelining the community. Commented Aug 20, 2025 at 14:19
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    @AndrasDeak--СлаваУкраїні No meta gave that feedback, and it had to be found among a lot of not actionable very unpleasant feedback. The disruption in communication came from both sides. Commented Aug 20, 2025 at 15:17
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    @Gimby that's a pretty revisionist take IMO. Yes there was a lot of "unpleasant" feedback (I'm not so sure about the "not actionable" part), but that is to be expected when the company does lots of unpleasant, ill-advised, and harmful things, and calling a cold community reaction to such things a "disruption in communication" seems like a stretch. Furthermore, suggesting it would not have been trivial to find good actionable feedback is just plainly incorrect as even the highest upvoted answers of the respective announcement posts were usually not addressed (or worse, handwaved away). Commented Aug 21, 2025 at 11:30
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Will you be releasing the data in a Data Dump or a dedicated JSON archive like what happened with Documentation?

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    related: Make Discussions posts available in SEDE Commented Aug 31, 2025 at 19:05
  • And see No. 5 request here: meta.stackoverflow.com/q/432250 :) Commented Aug 31, 2025 at 20:59
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    Why would you want such a dataset? From what I've seen of discussions, most of it would be spam, and the rest primarily useless chatter of the kind you can find on random programming reddits. Personally I'd love if they hard-delete all of it and acknowledge that it provided negative value. Commented Sep 1, 2025 at 11:25
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    @l4mpi there's not a single undeleted spam last I checked (and I checked frequently). A lot can be done with 'bad' data, and you can explore and see things/patterns even looking at literal sewage. Although, there are some (admittedly not many, but some) useful Discussions posts. In any case, I'd rather have an archive of something than hard-deleting it forever and ever. And honestly I wouldn't care about such acknowledgement (if I were in the same camp). It doesn't mean SO won't try to do similar things in the future, so it is as if I am looking for a hollow apology. Commented Sep 1, 2025 at 11:41
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    Then have fun looking at sewage I guess... but unlike real sewage I cannot think of any useful things you can do with the data (of course you can analyze it to death but to what end?). The "delete forever" part is definitely the important thing to me, not the acknowledgement - right now I'm happy that the trash is no longer on the site and no longer pollutes search results (which are already worse due to various other factors), and having it deleted on their end would mean there's no chance of any bright-eyed young PM resurrecting this garbage in the next "engagement" push. Commented Sep 1, 2025 at 11:53
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    @l4mpi this is not very constructive, nor nice, but anyway. They can delete and bring it back if they wanted. It's not like they won't have an archive for themselves. It also never polluted the search (well, after it was pulled from search very early on). Commented Sep 1, 2025 at 12:14
  • I'm not talking about SE search, I'm talking about external search engines, and I remember at least one instance of finding a discussions post from a web search. Not sure if they also pulled indexing of those at some point. Commented Sep 1, 2025 at 12:34

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