If you've participated in the Stack Overflow beta, perhaps you've found a bug, or you've got an idea for new or enhanced Stack Overflow functionality. This is the place to tell us!
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748 votes
allow changing the associated openid planned
If 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 -
517 votes
Don't base the reputation on soft, fun questions.
Reputation is relatively hard to learn by *answering* hard technical questions versus by *asking* soft fun questions.
I got addicted to Stackoverflow right away and for sure part of the addiction is the challenge of answering technical questions and getting recognition for the answers. But that turns out to be the slow, losers way of gaining reputation points. The fast way to earn reputation is by asking an entertaining question, like "What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered?" or "What’s the most egregious pop culture perversion of programming?".
In a weak moment, I posted one of those kind of questions myself, and I got more reputation from the question being upvoted then from all my hard-earned technical answers.
That pretty much killed my addiction to stackoverflow and much of my enjoyment of it.
the catch-22 is that a lot of people really get off on those questions, so we'd kill that part of the community with this solution.
- codinghorror -
479 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 -
468 votes
Remind to "accept answer" in user's profile
I see a lot of questions with correct answers, but not marked as the "accepted" answers by the ones who asked the questions.
I suggest that when the user is looking at his profile page, display a little reminder next to the question, like "You have not accepted an answer to this question yet". Or "accept an answer and add 2 points to your score".
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317 votes
Bounty system for unanswered questions started
Users 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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278 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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239 votes
Notify users when they gain or lose an ability started
I 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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230 votes
Make your software open source
It's a nice piece of software that I believe would be useful to others as well as improved by community contributions.
Do you plan to open source it?
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226 votes
Topic specific badges: Expert (SQL), Expert (CSS), etc. planned
It'd be great to allow users to develop reputation in a specific area: SQL, CSS, Python, etc.
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155 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 -
143 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 -
132 votes
Provide a blog badge to show off your StackOverflow badges. planned
It 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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124 votes
Allow multiple OpenIds for a single account planned
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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120 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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119 votes
Create "Off-topic" tab
To separate normal programming questions from off-topic/open-ended posts.
1) Create "Off-topic" tab
2) Questions tagged "off-topic" should only be visible in "Off-topic" tag
3) Add button "Move to off-topic section" next to close button. Clicking on button adds "off-topic" tag and moves question to appropriate section -
118 votes
arrow keys don't work on question/answers pages planned
I 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 -
100 votes
Force user to comment on downvote
I've seen a number of answers downvoted for no good (or at least apparent) reason. I think the downvoter should have to give a brief reason for the downvote. It could be anonymous, or even private.
It seems that the -1 rep just isn't enough to dissuade people from downvoting without any clear reason.
Just because an answer isn't spectacular isn't reason enough for a downvote (just don't upvote it), so if you can't think of a few words to explain the downvote, surely you shouldn't be downvoting?
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89 votes
Merge Tags, Rename Tags
Basically, It's the same thing, although implementation would differ if the destination name exists.
I'd like to be able to do a bulk rename on tags.
For example right now there are tags "bitmap" and "bitmaps"IDEA:
1) Click on a tag.
2) On .../questions/tagged/#tag# page, there should be an option to rename the tag.
3) If there is a collision, then cascade update all tagged questions to the new tag.
If no collision, then just change the tag name in the database.I'm trying my best to clean out redundant tags, but it's a very arduous task.
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85 votes
Provide rss for all views planned
I 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 -
79 votes
Narrow questions don't get voted up
I've noticed a pattern emerging. The razor narrow questions that SOF was intended for don't seem to get voted up. Perhaps if you're lucky you'll get one, maybe two votes, but for some reason, people just don't seems to feel compelled to vote for them. Whereas on the other hand, broad, subjective and 'fun' questions seem to really pull in the punters, gaining a shed-load of votes and a shed-load of answers.
Now, this isn't a problem per se, but it does seem to encourage people to post these broad, subjective, unanswerable questions and *dis*courages the narrower questions because, of course, people want the rep associated with a popular question.
Fundamentally, I'm more interested in actually getting my question answered, but it seems that many questions could be getting lost in the hubbub of the polls and the fun. But maybe this isn't a bad thing. After all, SOF is flexible enough to empower users to make it want they want it to be. Que Sera, Sera, if you like.
But I would like to ask, what can be done to encourage people to vote for the lonely little narrow questions? Or perhaps this is something that will just normalize over time, once people get bored of asking broad questions?
looks like we're going to implement per-post max rep limits, eg, beyond more than 10 votes you will not gain rep for any given question or answer.
- codinghorror -
71 votes
Offer OpenID registration directly through stackoverflow planned
Partner with another OpenID provider to make the signup easier so that people who don't really grok OpenID can just make an account *directly on stackoverflow* and get one magically. That way all the OpenID newbies will be using one without even knowing that they should be hatin'.
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67 votes
enforcing link to original "exact duplicate" question planned
The question at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/117716/coolest-piece-of-code-closed has been cosed citing it as an exact duplicate.
So we can see the related answer, should we enforce a link to the dupe question? Especially when someone with enough rep. tags it as an "exact dupe"!
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59 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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59 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 -
54 votes
tie advertisements to tags
So -- I'm a Linux type, and I'm seeing ads for Windows-only software. That sucks, especially because 'yall *know* I'm a Linux type -- I answer questions with Linuxy tags on them, watch Linuxy tags, and don't have much anything to do with Windows.
Please make your ad selection toolage smarter. I don't mind ads (so much as to block them on that account alone), but I only want to see interesting ones.
