Stack Overflow: None of Us is as Dumb as All of Us

The insightful ability to edit you answers (or even questions) is the single most amazing thing that answers the point you say critics are raising.

This means users have the opportunity to make the content as correct and as close to best practices as possible, leaving a great ‘reference’ for ‘posterity’.

Stack Overflow, IMO, is a great idea, which is being nicely executed.
Keep up the good work and we’ll all (or most) be very grateful.

I just don’t understand the need for an OpenID, but maybe it’s just me.

Your Venn diagram doesn’t show Twitter, IRC, or email. :wink:

I’ve got no complaints with OpenID, except that more sites don’t use it.

About 2/3 times I post a question, I get multiple fantastic responses quickly. About 1/3 times I get only lame early responses and then my question never gets voted up or apparently looked at again by a human being. Overall, it’s been very helpful. Definitely worth the price of admission (setting up an openID account.)

I think and hope it will work. It looks great and feels great! I’m a total amateur so I’ll stick around there for learning and hopefully I’ll get to the point where I can also start giving answers!
Thanks!

Now if only you can figure out how to get ExpertsExchange out of my google search results…

I’m gonna go sign up for your site now… perhaps you shall see more of me there.

I like it. It’s great. Looking forward to using it every week for the next 10 years.

Really enjoying the site Jeff. Would be nice to be able to provide specific feedback without a separate logon though…

Noah, I just logged in as

https://me.yahoo.com/eggsmclaren

which is an account I use for testing.

Ironically, for me at least, I think Stack Overflow is a victim of its own initial success. I tried subscribing to the RSS feed yesterday and there was just too much activity for me to try and keep up with. By the end of the day I had removed it from my feed.

I also found myself a bit reluctant to answer questions that had already been answered somewhat correctly. Yeah, I could elaborate or clarify an answer, but it seemed a small, incremental value add.

In one case, I found a questions with three 0-point answers. Two of them wrong and one correct. I tried to vote the correct one up, but alas, I didn’t have enough rep.

One potential improvements I can think of would be topic-specific or language-specific RSS feeds to filter down the volume.

And I’m with Bruno: supporting OpenID as a choice is nice, but as the authentication choice seems a bit limiting. Is it so hard to follow what 90% of the web does (email/password)? Is OpenID really any more secure? In the end, I had to sign up for an OpenID using - you guessed it - my email address and a password. So I jumped through a bunch of hoops to essentially prove to you the same info I would have with a simpler authentication scheme.

One potential improvements I can think of would be topic-specific or language-specific RSS feeds to filter down the volume.

Already exists: there are feeds for every tag, though we have not implemented tag combination feeds yet (I will try to get to that today).

http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag/mac

etc, etc, etc.

Jeff I looked around on the site and it’s fantastic! I’m going to annoy ahem I mean ask people questions as soon as I can. Of course I’ll also use my ‘infinite’ expertise to answer questions as well :slight_smile:

I think there is kind of strange dynamic developing on stackoverflow. Peoples are answering questions, any questions, all questions. Questions that should have been ditched/voted down in many cases. I think the reason behind that is that peoples try to find an opportunity to increase their reputation at all cost until at least a minimum level is reached. Thus choosing the easy/dumb ones for a starter.

The side effect is the noise and the quality of the questions. I mean there are questions out there that, on any typical forum, would have been flamed down fast and hard because the person asking did not (1) do his homework (2) check around for an answer (3) provide sufficient details for even the beginning of an answer to be elaborate.

I think that once the initial hype/buzz slows down a bit we will see less and less of those.

I think overall this is a great concept that ought to work.

Re: Yahoo: I’m also getting failed. I can see that I am logged into Yahoo, and I get a let me in button from Yahoo, but then stackoverflow says that I failed to authenticate, returning Failed

I’m looking forward to using the site. However, I too wish it didn’t require OpenID.

I tried it out, but it won’t even allow the user name I use here (periods not allowed in user names). Oh well.

For those complaining about having to create another set of credentials for Uservoice, you can use the uservoice site anonymously with almost all of the functionality you get if you’re signed in. I used it anonymously for about a week at the beginning.

Mind if I share a dirty little secret with you? Yahoo is a terrible OpenID provider. Their UI is awful for this.

Still, it should work. I’m logging in like crazy under every context I can think of with https://me.yahoo.com/eggsmclaren and that is a bone stock Yahoo account I created (minus enabling OpenID).

May I suggest that the accepted answer does get the check but is not moved to the top?

That way you have the most helpful answer (as voted by community) at the top, but the accepted answer is still shown prominently.

Giving the accepted answer too much promotion tends to cause the answers to lean toward the specific bias of the asker.

Just an idea.

I truly love the site, you have plenty of reason to be proud of what you’ve achieved. congratulations!

I do have to agree that openid is terrible. I think it fixes a problem that doesn’t exist. Why not just have a simple registration where you can register an email address and a password (we can handle keeping passwords in sync ourselves).

You wrote a brilliant post a while ago about automatically creating the account and letting the users ‘fill in the gaps’ (eg username, password) later as they decide the site is worth the effort. It would have been great if you’d done that here.

OK, I just created a new yahoo account and enabled OpenID. Works fine.

Don’t believe me? Try it yourself. Here’s the credentials:

OpenID: https://me.yahoo.com/stackoverflowtestguy
email: stackoverflowtestguy@yahoo.com
password: opensesame!

Works like a champ on http://stackoverflow.com

Works On My Machine™