The order of questions on the front page has changed drastically today, as per the blog post: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/stack-overflow-homepage-changes/

I already have a couple of observations about the scheme, but I didn't see a good place to discuss them. The question calling for change suggestions doesn't seem appropriate, and the one question claiming a bug has already been dismissed and is unlikely to get any positive feedback.

I will leave my own feedback as answers, one per topic.


Unanswered questions are often unanswered for a reason. Getting more eyeballs on them aren't going to fix that, and are just going to annoy us by throwing worse questions to the top of the heap.

  • If a question doesn't make sense or is too vague to be answered, it should be closed and/or downvoted (either of which would remove it from the front page), not ignored. Most upvoted questions that are unanswered, are unanswered because they're non-trivial and no one who's read it, has come up with an answer yet. In that case getting more people to look at the question helps. – sepp2k Nov 9 '10 at 18:44

Is the answer score weighing too much? Consider the question Understanding boost::disjoint_sets. Originally it was stuck in the top of my front page because the question score it very high (about +15). Then Kiril Kirov provided an answer which at that time voted up to +2, although it doesn't really address OP's problem.

But that +2 answer vote (equivalent to -17 question vote!) is enough to make the question disappear from the front page! That is too much, as an answer with +1 or +2 vote doesn't mean it is good enough yet, and may be I could provide a better answer.

I think the answer score's weight should use a non-linear scale, that only when the total score is ≥3 a significant contribution could be given.


I find the listing to be a little too static. Once I've seen a question I really only want to see it again if there has been activity on it. The only exception is when I'm using the Back button to get back to the listing, there seems to be some kind of auto-update that I don't see consistently and have never decided if it's helpful or annoying.


Ignored tags and uninteresting questions bubble up way too high. Above the fold on the first page, 6/9 questions are ignored, and the other 3 are questions that are now prompting me to ignore even more tags:

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It's only when I get below the fold do I start to find questions that are ostensibly interesting to me (i.e. in my interesting tags).

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