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394 votes
Solving the Fastest Gun in the West Problem
Each question's answers are sorted by descending score and then descending time of posting. This means that if a person sits down and answers a question in a long, thorough way, going through every nook and cranny, once they post their answer, it will already be one of about seven different ones, some of which have already been upmodded. This wouldn't be a problem if those answers were as thorough as the one this guy's posting, but they usually aren't. Some of them are downright wrong, some aren't even answers to the question asked because their poster didn't bother to read the question all the way through.
This causes a problem I like to call SO's Fastest Gun in the West Problem. I've come to a point where I'd rather just send a short, simple, correct explanation, than to go and do some proper research, write a whole blog post about it or even make sure the code I post even compiles, just so it will be noticed, as opposed to the incorrect ones.
As per the discussion here: http://beta.stackoverflow.com/questions/56103/fastest-gun-in-the-west-problem
A few ideas were raised:
1. A grace period during which votes don't matter and don't show. Display is always 'oldest first'.
2. A grace period during which one or more answer can be selected as 'the answer' by the question's poster.
3. Allow duplicate answers to be merged by either the question's owner, an outside editor or by both answer owners.
4. Change the badges and rep gain to encourage longer thinking, longer explanation, code samples, etc.
5. Update the answers 'live' for the first X minutes since it was created. This will help answerers refrain from duplication.(I would like to extend my thanks for the community for coming up with these suggestions)
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338 votes
Provide reputation metrics on the profile page
plannedPlease take this post to heart:
http://beta.stackoverflow.com/questions/6936/using-what-ive-learned-from-stackoverflow-html-scraper
and provide some metrics in the profile page (visible to all... or maybe with an option to expose the metrics to all).
Some nice things:
Graphs of your reputation over time
History of when you got upvotes/downvotes/accepted answers/accepted someone else/downvoted someone else
Ways of sorting the questions and answers by upvotes/views/number of responses
Anything else that might be interesting to know about the questions you've asked, answers you've received, questions you've answered, and the associated reputation....it will be a LONG WHILE before we get to this. See new features on user page: RECENT tab and REPLIES tab and MY VOTES tab
- codinghorror -
326 votes
Mark question as favorite
plannedI would like to be able to mark questions as favorites just like it made in GMail\GoogleReader
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324 votes
Tailored Home Page
The list of the most recent questions asked doesn't seem very useful given the range of topics contained in stackoverflow. Since a user is most likely not well-versed in all the categories that are being discussed, much of the home page ends up being "noise."
Perhaps this list could be automatically tailored to a user's interests based on the tags of questions they've posted or responded to. If not this, then some other way of tidying up the "clutter" would be nice.
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245 votes
allow changing the associated openid
plannedIf I decide to change OpenID providers, it would be nice to have a way to change that on my account, and associate with the new provider without losing any of my rep, etc.
agree
- codinghorror -
175 votes
Subscribe / Unsubscribe to questions != RSS feeds
RSS feeds are nice, but I think there should be also a feature allowing to subscribe to a question to receive updates in e-mails.
To use an RSS feed I have to add it to my reader, so I have to do some work (and sometimes rename it, and tag it). E-mail subscriptions are much better in this respect, because I can be automatically subscribed to every question I ask and every question I post an answer to.
yes, we would like to have complementary email notifications based on the RSS feed output as well.
- codinghorror -
176 votes
Filter Out Unwanted Tags From Results
plannedLots of folks on the site have noted the prolific 'stackoverflow' posts. What we really need is a way to blacklist certain tags per user, so that questions with those tags don't appear in our search results.
Lots of people have talked about filterting IN results for tags, but we definitely need the ability to filter OUT tags from results as a user preference.
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118 votes
reputation: what changed it recently (feature req)
Would be cool to have a way to get back to the site, see your reputation went up by 30 points and be able to see why.
now, I try to see from memory where I got extra votes etc', but why not have a little "recent history" of all actions affecting my reputation? can be last 10 or something small, but I am sure people will go back to see this list over and over...
most of this is available on the current user page -- answer votes * 10, plus question votes * 10, plus accepted, minus downvotes, etc.
- codinghorror -
114 votes
provide a search to help find "partially answered" questions
It's hard to find the questions that have been answered but not to the satisfaction of the asker.
There should be a way to find questions with no chosen answer that have not been answered in, say, 48 hours.
That means the asker is either waiting for a better answer or has given up.
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112 votes
Notify users when they gain or lose an ability
plannedI think it would be a good idea to show a yellow notify bar when a user passes a rep threshold (in either direction).
It could also have a link to a page explaining the new ability and what it is intended to be used for.
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113 votes
Bounty system for unanswered questions
plannedUsers could pledge reputation points for popular questions they'd like to see answered. The accepted answerer would get all the reputation points.
I don't know if this could cause gaming problems, but it'd be nice to encourage someone to do the research answer tough questions.
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84 votes
Badge: Cooperative Questioner
Mark Harrison asked how to indicate that he's a "cooperative questioner", meaning that he takes the time to review and upvote good answers. I suggested he request a badge for this, but I cant find it in the search, so I thought I'd open the request.
I think ideally we would have two badges here. The first badge would be for selecting an "accepted answer" for, say, 50% of questions asked. The second would be for upvoting at least, say, 15% of answers to your questions (maybe more?).
Both of these badges would be best if they were volatile badges, in that they would come and go based on continued good behavior on the part of the user. e.g., If your "selected answer" ratio falls below 50%, you lose the badge.
Here's a link to the original thread:
http://beta.stackoverflow.com/questions/8198/how-can-i-indicate-that-i-am-a-cooperative-questionerpossible
- codinghorror -
80 votes
Topic specific badges: Expert (SQL), Expert (CSS), etc.
plannedIt'd be great to allow users to develop reputation in a specific area: SQL, CSS, Python, etc.
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75 votes
Updates while writing answer
One thing that annoys is when people post the same answer to a question because while they were busy writing an answer, someone else posted essentially the same answer to the question. It might be nice if there was some way to update the page while someone is writing an answer so that they see answers added in the time between originally landing on the page and writing out their answer. Perhaps this kind of updating only happens if the user is actively writing an answer (i.e. the answer textbox is not empty) so that it doesn't take up too much extra bandwidth...
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59 votes
Provide a blog badge to show off your StackOverflow badges.
plannedIt would be cool if you provided an html snippet that one could throw out on their blog (or other site) to display their StackOverflow ranking and badges.
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53 votes
Unaswered vs. no accepted answer
After opening to the public it seems to me questions are very quick to get answered by what I like to call forum inhibiots. People who post a forum response for the sake of responding, even if they have nothing to add, or don't even understand the question.
The first response to this is an example:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/71469It would make more sense to have questions with no accepted answer in the "Unanswered" tab, in order of number of posts. A question with two responses, neither accepted, is still unanswered.
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50 votes
arrow keys don't work on question/answers pages
plannedI can't use the arrow keys, pgup, pgdown, etc on the question/answers pages. On all other pages they work fine.
has to do with the WMD control, we will look into this. I noticed that too.
ALSO: depends on browser, appears to be specific to Firefox; doesn't happen for me in Opera, IE7, or Safari/Chrome.
- codinghorror -
45 votes
Alternative Discussion Location
Stack Overflow seems to be acquiring more and more "discussion" type posts as the beta goes on. It's natural for a community to want to discuss things, but the primary purpose of SO is very much a Q&A type site, as noted from the terminology and UI throughout the site. I think the users need some type of alternate location for discussions so they don't get mixed in with the actual questions and pollute the content of the site itself.
And user voice doesn't count. :P
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42 votes
Provide rss for all views
plannedI would like to have rss for these pages too.
http://beta.stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=newest
http://beta.stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=hot
http://beta.stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=votes
http://beta.stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=active
http://beta.stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=answers -
41 votes
self delete answer badge!
sometimes we blow it and post gibberish. it should be encouraged for users to delete posts that are not contributing to "The One Answer". And we all love badges more than cookies from mom.
this is another good idea -- I do want to encourage people to self-delete irrelevant, obsolete, or noisy answers
- codinghorror -
36 votes
RSS: custom tag feeds using OR
RSS feeds based on tags but more logic involved - allow use of OR plus AND
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38 votes
Allow us to get updates via e-mail or RSS feed.
It would be nice to be able to be informed if:
1. someone responded to my question
2. someone up or downgraded something of mine
3. if my reputation went over a certain amount (e.g. 100)Would that be possible?
the users tab has most of this; subscribe to the RSS feeds there. We haven't fully exposed all the tabs on the user page as RSS yet
- codinghorror -
30 votes
VB.NET code blocks
commented code in VB.NET typically begins with a single quote. SO reads this as a literal string, and doesn't end the string at the end of the line, so subsequent lines are shown in the literal string color, instead of their appropriate color.
I know damned VB.NET...
limitation of google's prettify.js that we use
- codinghorror -
28 votes
Provide a job postings
A "post jobs" section, like http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com/
A perhaps pay service to have a section for posting jobs and for users of the site to browse for jobs. As an employee of a company looking for good people, I think this site would be a great resource for matching good people to good jobs.
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28 votes
multiple tags on tag page
I know I can now see questions with multiple tags by entering the URL http://beta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/php mysql, but this requires me to go up to the address bar, and I wonder how many folks actually know they can do this.
What if you allowed us to specify multiple tags on the tags page, and display search results that way, which in turns redirects to the URL listed above.
I believe this is the work flow for single tags, can it be expanded to support multiple?
as of tonight's push you can search tags by adding them in brackets eg [java] [sql]
- codinghorror -
26 votes
search tag1 and not tag2
Basically I want all questions with the tag "javascript" without the tag "c#".
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25 votes
Add a badge for "Necrovoting"
It would be nice to have a badge that is similar to "Necromancer" except that it would apply to voting a question or answer over a year old up. This might be useful to encourage people to remember to vote old questions and answers up if they find them useful.
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25 votes
Allow multiple OpenIds for a single account
I currently cannot log in to StackOverflow with my existing account because my OpenID provider (namely technorati) is down.
Is there a way to allow a certain user to use two or more separate OpenID providers for a single account, just in case the provider is down?
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23 votes
Make ctrl-delete work like a normal text editor
In the answer text editor, ctrl-delete looks like it creates a blockquote or something. That's annoying when I am used to ctrl-delete always delete whole words to the right of the cursor.
we are trying to get (non-obfuscated) source to the WMD editor and will revisit this when we do!
- codinghorror -
20 votes
provide a database dump of public data
There is a lot of information on the site that is public and could be obtained by screen scraping the site. To avoid screen scraping (bad for the site owner and a waste of time and effort for the scrapers), and to foster development of additional data mining and reporting tools, I suggest you provide a database dump of the public data, like Wikipedia does. This would include all question, answer, and comment data, tags, user records with public fields including badges, and links between everything. It would specifically exclude individual voting data, and only provide a vote count on questions and answers.
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20 votes
lowercase c# yields no results
When I search for "c#", I get no results. When I search for "C#" I get results. Can you make this case insensitive?
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19 votes
Auto-Subscribe To Questions
When you go to implement the question subscription (which will be by e-mail, as well as RSS, right?), a feature I'd like to see is an opt-in auto-subscribe to any question that you participate in. That way whenever the question is updated, you get an e-mail letting you know that another response has been posted.
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17 votes
Drill down through tags
I'd like to be able to click on a tag, then have it show all of the other tags that the returned questions have, then keep clicking down.
For example:
1. I click the php tag and it shows me all of the questions tagged with php and a sub-tag cloud for those questions.
2. Then I click on the regex tag and it shows me all of the questions that are tagged with php AND regex.
Repeat ad-inifinitum.
interesting idea, need to make tag combinations more discoverable..
- codinghorror -
18 votes
Paging Still Broken
I just went to view all unanswered questions and I noticed that the paging is still broken. It shows:
1 2 3 ... 3 next
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14 votes
Add comments to user feed
plannedRight now only the answers appear in the user feed. Make a new feed for the comments or add them in the existing one.
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14 votes
Filter questions with accepted answers
I would like to see the converse of the "unanswered" tab for Questions. When I'm looking to contribute, a filter for unanswered questions is great, but when I really just need an answer (or I'm just generally looking for great answers so I can learn something), I'd like to be able to see a list of questions with accepted answers.
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14 votes
Delete user accounts
Does there exist a way to delete user accounts? Maybe ones that haven't done anything yet?
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12 votes
Provide feed for searches
I would like to be able to do a search, and get an RSS or Atom feed for that search.
Use case: I am an expert of X, so I want to be notified when people ask a question about X, so I can help them out.
why do tag feeds not work for you?
- codinghorror -
12 votes
Related question in the side bar
How about providing links to related questions at the right side of a question (that has being ask, not while submitting one)?
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12 votes
New section or site for IT professionals
As an IT Pro, I want a Stackoverflow for me! I have seen that a lot of IT questions are being voted down, so it's clear that having a single focus is great for devs but not great for others who want to share in the excellent user interface and experience that is stackoverflow.
ask me again in 3-6 months
- codinghorror -
11 votes
improve performance of StackOverflow on FireFox in Linux.
I've noticed that in cases where I'm typing in a "add comment" box for a question or for a answer, especially when there is already a comment, the entire browser seems to lockup for a few seconds for every few characters. I've started typing my comments in a text document and then pasting them in because of it. I'm using Firefox in Fedora 9 x64.
