Jump to content

The Stack Exchange User Guide/Printable version

25% developed
From Wikibooks, open books for an open world


The Stack Exchange User Guide

The current, editable version of this book is available in Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection, at
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Stack_Exchange_User_Guide

Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The Home Page

The Stack Overflow homepage in 2015.

To begin, open your browser and navigate to https://stackoverflow.com/.

The page contains quite a bit of information and can be a little overwhelming at first glance, so we'll begin by learning what each of the elements on the page is for individually.

The Top Bar

[edit | edit source]

We will begin by examining the bar at the top of the screen:

On the left is a link to the StackExchange homepage. On the right is a set of links and the searchbox. The links present in the topbar provide access to other sites related to StackOverflow, the login page, and information about StackOverflow. When you are logged in, this page will also contain a link to your profile page.

The Question Bar

[edit | edit source]

The question bar contains links to the various pages available on the site:

Stackoverflow question bar, showing links to: Questions, Tags, Users, Badges, Unanswered, and Ask Question.

The questions page is the page displayed when you bring up the home page. The tags page consists of the most popular tags that questions are tagged with. The users page contains a list of users sorted by their reputation. The badges page contains a list of all badges that can be earned (except for tag badges). The unanswered page contains a list of all unanswered questions. Finally, the ask question link takes you to a page where you can ask a question on the site.

The Question List

[edit | edit source]

The majority of the content on the page consists of the list of recent questions. The list is sorted by most recently modified questions. Here is an example question:


From the information visible here, we can see that the question was viewed 5 times, has 0 answers, and has 0 votes. It was asked by a user named "Darko Z" and was last modified 3 seconds ago. It has 3 tags: "asp.net", "iis7", and "iis-7.5". Clicking the title of the question will take you to the question's page.


The Stack Exchange Sites

Stack Exchange is organized into a number of smaller subsites, each focusing on a specific topic or field. The programming focused Stack Overflow is perhaps the best known of these sites, however there are a number of other Q&A sites on the platform including topics from sciences and the humanities.

Notable Stack Exchange sites

[edit | edit source]
Logo URL Name Topic
Stack Exchange logo https://stackexchange.com/ Stack Exchange Overall site
Stack Overflow logo https://stackoverflow.com/ Stack Overflow Programming
Super User logo
https://superuser.com/ - Super User Power users
Ask Ubuntu logo https://askubuntu.com/ Ask Ubuntu Ubuntu Linux
Physics Stack Exchange logo
Physics Stack Exchange logo
https://physics.stackexchange.com/ Physics Study of physics
https://serverfault.com/ Server Fault Sysadmin
https://math.stackexchange.com/ Mathematics Math
https://gaming.stackexchange.com/ Arqade Gaming
https://english.stackexchange.com/ English English language
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/ World Building Fictional world development
https://webapps.stackexchange.com/ Web Applications Software for the world wide web
https://diy.stackexchange.com/ Home Improvement Do it yourself upgrades for living quarters
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/ Game Development For creation of video games
https://tex.stackexchange.com/ TeX For the typesetting software TeX and LaTeX
https://movies.stackexchange.com/ Movies & TV For discussion of broadcast and film media
https://ai.stackexchange.com/ Artificial Intelligence Study of AI
https://emacs.stackexchange.com/ Emacs Discussion of the Emacs text editor
https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/ Puzzling Discussion of puzzles
https://arduino.stackexchange.com/ Arduino Discussion of the Arduino physical computing platform


Asking a Question

Before asking a question, it is good etiquette to check to see if your question has been asked before.

Include as much relevant information about what your exact question is. This not only helps people better answer your question, it helps those that follow know if the answer to your question is also the answer to their question.



How Reputation Is Earned

Reputation on Stack Exchange sites is a quantified measure of a user's place in the community. In some instances reputation can be spent as a currency to enable certain actions.

Reputation is generally earned by asking useful questions and giving useful answers. Reputation is typically lost by doing the inverse.



What is 'meta'?

On the Stack Exchange sites each site has there very own 'meta' to report bugs, feature requests, support and site discussion and each question has to be tagged with one of those. The URL for each per-site child 'meta' is http://meta.sitename.stackexchange.com/ or as in the cases of Server Fault, http://meta.serverfault.com/ and Super User, http://meta.superuser.com/.

The 'meta' on http://meta.stackoverflow.com/ is a very special one as it is a network-wide 'meta'. It is used to report on bugs, feature requests, support and site discussion for sites within The Stack Exchange Network 2.0. (http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/47634/)

1.0 sites bugs, feature requests, support questions must be via the website or webmaster and not though Stack Exchange.

Earning Reputation

[edit | edit source]

All per-site child 'meta's' reputation is exactly the same as the main site, users can still vote and post answers but all votes will not change you 'meta' score. Please not that you reputation is cached from the main site for 24-48 hours.