Update: Channels are now called: .

When you use Stack Overflow to solve some of your problems, you begin wanting to use it for everything. We've often said that Stack Overflow isn't a place for everything that programmers want to do and talk about, but we've always wished that we could make it easier for teams of engineers to better support one another on the same site where they give so much to the public interests of programming.

It has always been difficult to accommodate folks that want to collaborate more closely in a manner that prevents them from clashing with what we've built as conventional public Q&A; there are many kinds of questions that simply don't work well in our shared body of knowledge.

Doing surgery with Git to resolve a common problem is generally on-topic as a question on Stack Overflow. Asking how any particular software company uses Git in their workflow isn't the best question to ask on Stack Overflow because it's not really related to a programming problem someone outside of that company would face.

Supporting your coworkers on Stack Overflow has always been a little daunting, to say the least.

What teams keep telling us they need is a place where teammates can support each others' private questions on the same site where they already get help with their public ones. Since the earliest days of the site, devs asked for ways to use SO for questions about code or practices that needed to stay private. And since we've launched SO Enterprise, we've had a ton of inquiries from companies too small for a local install, but who want to pay for a private space on SO.

We're happy to announce that we've come up a way to provide those places, and we're calling them:

Stack Overflow Channels

What we're calling channels can be summed up as:


Channels are a means for organizations to provide a quiet space for their engineering teams to collaborate pretty much unrestricted and unstructured apart from public Q&A on Stack Overflow through a more private means that we're calling a channel. Channels are for organizations both large and small and do not in any way affect public Q&A.

This allows for a stronger kind of engagement without asking more from our seasoned users, because ownership stays entirely with the owners and administrators of the channels.

If you stop reading now, there are two important and essential things you should know about channels:

  1. They work just like regular Q&A, but their content as well as access to privileges to moderate their content are confined to the folks participating within the channel. What happens in a channel, including any rep or privileges earned, stays in a channel sort of like what happens in Vegas.
  2. Channels in no way affect standard public Q&A, they just have access to the same features and tools. Each channel is free to set its own moderation policy, define what is on-topic, etc. It is entirely up to channel owners and administrators to review and maintain their content.

We eventually plan to charge for some tiers of channels, but we're not yet sure how much that's going to be or when we're going to begin. Rest assured, there will be plenty of notice prior to that happening; our main interest right now is building the platform to be as useful as it can possibly be. One of the things we really love about Channels is that it will better align part of our monetization strategy with Q&A, which we think will help us be able to continue to invest in improvements to our flagship product.

Allowing developers to centralize where they find technical solutions in a single place has been a huge task over the years. We've struggled with ways to attack it before, but channels will bring us a lot closer to making it a reality.

Wait, how are these things going to work?

Think of a channel as a sort of private repository. It has an owner that can approve other users to join, and give some of those users additional privileges to do things.

When you operate within a channel, all of the privileges you earn (including reputation, etc.) remain specific to that channel, where your ability to contribute will grow over time, depending on how the channel is configured.

Folks that belong to channels will be able to search content from a single location, but reputation, privileges and moderation access within a channel won't carry over to public Q&A.

Is this part of Enterprise? Will there be a public version for open source?

No. Enterprise is a full-blown private site that is set up specifically for an organization to use. The two are completely separate products.

Channels are for teams that want to use a single resource, but need a more private and quiet place to do it, and should be useful for teams way too small for Enterprise to be a good solution.

We're not too concerned about fragmentation, because an asker with questions that would serve the public interest is better off asking them there. (Who's going to ask their twelve teammates a question when they can ask the full Stack Overflow community?)

Any plans to offer these for product support, or other public channels?

Mayprobably? Because so many devs have asked for it and the fact that it's the one we think can monetize easily, we're starting with a focus on Private Channels targeting development teams. But assuming that works, we would definitely consider expanding to public channels serving different use cases. (Especially if we think those channels could actually help Q&A, by addressing some needs that the community can help with, but which cause problems when mixed in with "traditional" Q&A.)

However, it's way too early to tell if that's a direction that channels will go, or how a less private scheme might work.

What do you want / need us to do now? How do we get started?

We need to see how product teams both large and small are going to use what we've put together as an initial offering, and gauge how much interest folks have in trying / using Channels as it matures.

Head over here, have a quick read, and tell us about your organization. We'll then be in touch to get any additional information required and get you set up once we're ready to go!

We also invite you to use the answers below to ask any questions that you have about how things are going to work, directions we plan to take or similar questions. This is a big step for us, there's lots of information, and it's impossible to include all of the most exciting details in a single post.

We want to get your input as early as possible, which is why we're

  1. Working on opening channels up for testing now, before we're even quite ready to share an early viable product.

  2. Asking for any suggestions or asks for possible features now - please post them below.

We really want to know how channels can help you and your team get your jobs done and what we can do to make sure it fits the many different types of teams that we envision using it.

We're also quite happy to answer any questions about technical details on how the system works, so please don't be shy about asking.

  • 53
    There's absolutely no reason why a channel would need to stay confined to programming related questions, is there? That sounds interesting in so many ways. Any rough ideas about pricing yet? Is there likely to be a free tier? – Pekka 웃 Jul 11 '17 at 16:42
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    @Pekka웃 We're targeting development teams (for obvious reasons, I hope). But those teams can use the engine for any questions they want in theory - they'll be self-moderated. And we'd be open to other teams who want to use it at some point, too. – Jaydles Jul 11 '17 at 16:45
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    @Pekka웃 it's too early to guess at the right pricing, or even exactly who does and doesn't pay. We'd like to mostly optimize for breadth of adoption first - we want to get this useful to the most devs, so there are tons of companies who want to pay for it. That might well mean a "free forever" tier for some kinds of teams, but we really don't know yet. – Jaydles Jul 11 '17 at 16:48
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    So this is what "Teams" was supposed to be? – user4639281 Jul 11 '17 at 16:59
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    I like this a lot because it could be a solid way to add real value and make good money, yet is unlikely to cause a gigantic rift in the community by stretching the site's mission and soul into new untested directions. – Pekka 웃 Jul 11 '17 at 17:08
  • 48
    Since nobody's said it yet: credit where it's due on announcing this in such a straight-forward way, early, and with genuine engagement on all the questions and details. I know there's been a lot of push-back on some features, rightly or wrongly, so this initial discussion looks really promising. :) – IMSoP Jul 11 '17 at 17:28
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    @IMSoP really appreciate you saying that. I'm sure we'll keep hitting some places where not everyone agrees with what get's prioritized, but we really did hear the feedback that it's frustrating at not at least being involved sooner. Plus frankly, it makes us dumber than we need to be. In addition to generally being more open more early, we're working hard on trying to find ways to align monetization more closely with Q&A, which is why we're pretty pumped on where we think this one is headed.) – Jaydles Jul 11 '17 at 17:46
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    @Jay also kudos on being up front about the fact that you're doing this for money with some user benefits, instead of trying to pass it off as being wonderful and magnanimous :) – ArtOfCode Jul 11 '17 at 17:53
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    @ArtOfCode thanks! We'd like to think it's both! Buuuuut... I'm told you can't purchase goods and services with wonder and magnanimity, so we definitely want to stay focused on how to make more money - while staying true to the collaborative, open spirit that made this thing work in the first place. (Side note: I'm more than a little surprised that "magnanimity" turned out to be an actual word.) – Jaydles Jul 11 '17 at 17:57
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    44 upvotes and only 1 downvote. A much needed mental health break for some on the team I'm sure :) – Pekka 웃 Jul 11 '17 at 18:50
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    I have a slight worry that this could have a negative impact on Q&A in the fact that it's open to abuse; active high rep users could get together and create a channel just so they don't have to deal with the rubbish posted on SO. It could end up being that a lot of users club together to create a "separate" SO without the need to worry about anything on SO. There's a slight chance queues could be impacted in a negative way. Or am I worrying over nothing here? – Bugs Jul 11 '17 at 19:36
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    @Bugs meta.stackoverflow.com/a/352089/1048539 – enderland Jul 11 '17 at 19:37
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    Sounds good, but discussing Git workflows you can do also on software engineering.stackexchange. So I kind of fail to see the need really. For small teams (say less than 10,000 participants), there are surely tons of content management systems out there. Why again do people want to use SO for everything? – Trilarion Jul 11 '17 at 21:06
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    This seems to be targeted at engineering stuff by being posted on MSO rather than MSE, is there a reason for that? Surely the QA doesn't need to be limited to techie stuff, just like the SO network isn't? – DavidG Jul 12 '17 at 8:12
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    Just want to say this: I believe in this idea WAY more than I ever believed in Documentation and Developer Story. – Benjol Jul 12 '17 at 12:34

39 Answers 39


I think this is very interesting. I would like to use this feature for a small project for several reasons.

It would facilitate...

  • Q&A across multiple subjects. For example, it would provide a single space to talk about how to spin up a hyper-v instance while in the same space also providing a place to talk about how to best approach a UX solution with regards to accessibility.
  • Q&A with people who are not users of any Stack Exchange sites. While it may be a requirement to create a user profile for the channel (raised as a separate issue), it will be nice to include users who may not be as aware of the platform if they are in related fields.
  • A timeline of use. While it may be against the spirit of Stack Overflow to simply use posts to document process, ideas, or todos, using that in a private setting will allow a very powerful "checklist" of sorts. I believe that in some ways the Stack Overflow team already uses this approach with the tag.

Pricing is certainly an issue though. While this is nice to have, it isn't going to necessarily be need to have and the reasons for use can already be accomplished in separate settings. Maybe one channel could also be included as a 100k privilege? :)

  • 3
    "Maybe one channel could also be included as a 100k privilege?" And later that day an industry spawns around serial upvoting, fueled by people who don't even know how cheaper it is to just buy a channel than to run an upvoter server farm. (Okay, that was too apocalyptic, but serial upvoting could still skyrocket with a normally paid service becoming free for super-high-rep users.) – dorukayhan Jul 12 '17 at 1:57
  • How many 100k users are actually on the same team, and could therefore benefit from having a channel? (If someone wants to create docs for himself, he can simply use stackedit.io or something.) Making them available for free to open source teams might make sense, though. – jpaugh Nov 8 '17 at 21:19
  • @jpaugh - I guess the point would be that some of the users on the team are not actual Stack Exchange users, but could be onboarded for the purposes of the private channel. – Travis J Nov 8 '17 at 21:45

More to make a record of this than anything else: I expect that there will be a lot of small channels, and some of the community-management lessons you learn from running them will also apply to smaller sites in the Q&A network. Hopefully (and presumably), when the people on the Channels team are looking at things that might be useful to port over to Q&A sites, they will keep smaller sites in mind and not get "tunnel vision" for Stack Overflow.

(previously discussed in MSE chat)


How are you going to handle authentication?

Will channel owners be able to do things like restrict new signups to be with an email address at @ourspecifieddomain.tld? Or from owner-specified IP blocks? Or will we be able to/have to send invite emails?

What tools will owners have to make sure the people signing up for our channels are actually the people we want to authorize to join them?

Will users who already have SE accounts be able to use them in private channels? Will there be a way for channel owners to extend membership to extant SE accounts?

If a user has different accounts for public SO ("133thaxx0r@mydomain.tld") and private channels ("f.last@myemployer.tld"), will SE support multi-account log-in, or will such a user have to log in and out to use the public and private parts of SO?

  • 1
    Current thinking: yes to all of those things except IP blocks. That's an interesting notion we haven't considered but have the infrastructure for - if there was demand we could likely do such a thing. On tools: we want to hear options here, perhaps an approval queue, or open to anyone with an email without approval, etc. There are a lot of options. On accounts: we don't want you to juggle multiple accounts, moving around should be seamless and easy. Multi-login is already a thing :) – Nick Craver Jul 12 '17 at 10:44

Since folks have asked about moderation already...

How would privileges be handled? On one hand, if the users are hand picked by the channel admin, many of the usual, moderation related limits feel a bit un-necessary - stuff like comments.

On the other hand, if this is a main site feature, would a minimum (moderate?) reputation requirement for starting a channel or being an admin be a good idea? This would indicate at least a moderate engagement in the site.

Would channels be automatically created in future, or go through some request/creation process?

If we have the sort of thing we wouldn't find acceptable on the main site - would mods talk to just the person involved or the channel admin as well?

  • There's more to consider here, but likely privileges inside a channel would mostly be floored to 1 rep (these are site settings, so it's easy). Team members should be able to comment instantly for example. Since Channels are private (current thinking) and you have to be allowed or invited in, a lot of the moderation concerns are indeed far lower bars. We're open to any and all thoughts here - it'll be an interesting aspect of the beta to be sure. SO mods wouldn't see Channels content, only the Channel mods. Automatic creation is TBD. I'm working on the tech side of Channel spin-up now. – Nick Craver Jul 12 '17 at 10:49
  • That essentially means though, you're trusting channels to mod themselves. Which hasn't always worked that great in many cases and things running outside the standard moderation system essentially means we'd need to rethink a lot of things. How's on/off topic stuff handled? (Cause someone is DEFINATELY going to ask where to buy pizza) . We don't also have the same feedback loops we'd have when things go wrong in a private space... so that's worth thinking about too – Journeyman Geek Jul 12 '17 at 10:54
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    Let me phrase it this way, not confrontational just a question: why do you care? If people are paying for their own space, a large degree of decision making for their encapsulated world would be up to them. If a team of devs wants to list what places are best to buy pizza near them, why not? The on/off topic we don't expect to be the same as Stack Overflow. I'm curious what people think here and equally important why it matters, given it's a separate space. Can you detail a bit on why it would matter, and how it impacts you as a user? We're getting ideas here :) – Nick Craver Jul 12 '17 at 11:29
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    Yup, and that's probably fine. But also something worth thinking of up front. One of SE's big attractions is that its low noise, though somewhat broader scope. Now, a channel would have a smaller scope, but we're starting to have something like a. ... three and a halfed space - between chat and QA at this point. And why it matters is well - some of the recent attempts to expand the SO brand into ... things kinda suffers from, what I feel is throw it at a wall and see if it sticksitis. Which is fine of course, but its worth remembering that works less well with baked lasangnia. and least – Journeyman Geek Jul 12 '17 at 11:34
  • with the early stages, it feels like its worth articulating - "This is a SO style thing with these differences" and putting out a bit of a starter on what the tool really is. So, its fine deciding where to order pizza, if we expect users to do that. In which case though, yeah. A wider issue I find with a lot of these initiatives (compared to the past is), sometimes its a little unclear what's the real problem being solved. QA existed cause forums sucked (Even if Jeff's now trying to build a better forum). Chat's handy as a social space. I'm trying to articulate/understand what niche this – Journeyman Geek Jul 12 '17 at 11:37
  • fills that current products don't and how its probably best used. Also sorry about the triple comment spam. – Journeyman Geek Jul 12 '17 at 11:38
  • Are you saying you're worried about "bad habits" from private Channels bleeding out into public Q&A? – Josh Caswell Jul 12 '17 at 12:07
  • Well, oddly no, I was thinking of bad habits happening in private channels themselves to an extent, without any way to handle them until they explode. The developer world does occasionally suffer from rashes of excessive drama sometimes . – Journeyman Geek Jul 12 '17 at 12:10
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    @JourneymanGeek, the most import question is, if the rash of excessive drama does happen whose problem is it? – Benjol Jul 12 '17 at 12:26
  • Precisely where I was going before I got side tracked by food metaphors and less dramatic issues I think. – Journeyman Geek Jul 12 '17 at 12:27

I'm happy that Channels has become a thing, I think that if it ships with all the right features for teams then it could be a real game-changer and I don't always use that phrase. One thing that stuck out for me though:


I've never heard of SO Enterprise before, but if this already does some/all of what Channels is, how come Enterprise isn't being tweaked to accommodate the things that Channels sets out to fix? Would an Enterpise Lite version be more appropriate?

One thing I mentioned in my survey was the pricing for Channels (for me) comes completely down to privacy and security. If you can do the same thing in Channels as you can in public SO, the only difference is privacy then surely that's an easier problem to provide a solution for (cheaper, lighter Enterprise).


Assuming Channels is full steam ahead, I'd personally like to see the following features that would make this a worthwhile project in my eyes. Thanks to some of the responses here, I didn't think of some of these.

  • Improve the search (thanks canon) and maybe have the ability to search for public questions as well as private? You might not have something asked and answered in your channel, but it might be on the public site already.

  • Moderation (thanks Brad Larson) in Channels is an interesting point. Personally if you have to moderate your own Channel (which you should), I don't see the need for rep as such. In a closed off group of in some instances, maybe 5 people, rep seems obsolete. Just allows certain powers to be dished out perhaps?

  • Migrating (thanks Dave and others) questions from Channels to the public SO would be an absolute must. If no one in an org knows the answer to something, then Channels is effectively redundant in a sense. You could argue that you should just check for existing answers and just re-post, but from a UX point of view, this makes Channels feel more integrated into SO.

Other points worth a mention that many picked up on:

  • Do Channels need Wikis, Jobs, Documentation etc? It might be handy to have that kind of thing available (essentially a mini SO within SO).

  • I've mentioned this above. To me, Channels is just a private list of questions. Whilst the time and effort of the engineering team behind this project will be huge, I hope a pricing structure is priced appropriately and accessible for even small teams as well as big ones. Channels is basically private questions.

  • How will profiles integrate with SO and Channels? Do you need a public Stack Exchange/StackOverflow profile to take part in a channel? If so, are they linked in some way and what happens if you wish to remove someone from a channel in this scenario?

Very early days, and I'm excited to see what happens, but I'm curious as to how the project will address the many questions that have been asked.


Is there any intention of offering other relevant SE sites through channels, e.g.:

... or are these teams expected to lump all that content under the SO channel (since we can't really stop them anyway)?

  • 2
    Speaking as someone with only minimal understanding of Channels, I think the goal is to encourage these sorts of discussions on a team's channel, if the team finds them helpful. I kinda limits the usefulness of a channel if you can't ask about, say, server configuration for some arbitrary reason. The topic of each channel will be set by the individual users, not by the domain name. – Jon Ericson Jul 21 '17 at 15:14
  • @JonEricson I guess what I mean is, "Will there be any special means, beyond tags, of corralling content which would normally be relegated to an entire dedicated site?" – canon Jan 8 '18 at 20:43

I own a small hardware sourcing and manufacturing company. Much of our tech is complicated that results in hand holding costs.

I would like to have a StackExchange site or channel that is part of the greater community (i.e. easy sign-up) and provides some minor level of control.

I hope to have the site/channel monitored to build equity into the QA format for our products. I don't care if that means a channel in a "hardware configuration, deployment, and operations" stack site.

Is this possible? Should I be looking at Enterprise even though I don't demand ownership, because primarily I want to make the information readily available.


  • 2
    You are probably better off looking at some of the SO clones, and hosting your own site – psubsee2003 Nov 12 '17 at 20:13
  • That's too bad. Some of the value is the communities and the ease of signing up if you are already part of one. – N-ate Nov 12 '17 at 23:11

Is it same as what Workplace is for Facebook? Our organization currently uses Workplace and I love it. I would love to recommend Channels in our organization.


Will there still be hats at Christmas? Can we have our own branded hats?

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