I was searching for answers for one of many daily issues we all normally have and found something quite odd. After finding  Stack Overflow, I've stumbled upon , which is an exact copy of the first one. Should this be allowed? I thought about posting on Stack Overflow, but I believe that this matter is about Stack Exchange as a whole.
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of Stack Overflow, all content posted on Stack Exchange sites by their users (i.e. you wonderful people) has been provided to the whole universe under . For my fellow non-lawyers, that license basically means:   Anyone can use any Stack Exchange posts at any time without having to ask for permission Making money off of the copied content is permitted You don't even have to copy stuff from here verbatim; you can just use it as a starting point and make whatever edits you want There are just two rules you have to follow:   You have to provide . Simple links to the original post and author info are just fine. You have to  and allow other people to use your content, as long as they follow these very same rules. How meta!    (If you ever forget any of that, and want to refresh your memory, the license info is linked to in the footer of every page.)  There are, in fact, a lot of people who republish varying amounts of our content for assorted reasons. Unfortunately, there are some Stack Content Republishers Attributing Poorly and/or Excelling at Ranking (SCRAPERs, for short).  In this context, "attributing poorly" means any use that doesn't follow our attribution rules or make any other reasonable attempt at give credit. This can get pretty egregious; I've seen SCRAPERs that not only don't link back to SE originals, but also use fake author info and post dates to make it harder to find originals. By "excelling at ranking," I'm referring to copycat sites that end up higher in Google results than the original SE sites do for the same content. That's not necessarily wrong, but in some cases, it indicates inappropriate SEO hackery.  So, the question is: what can you do if you spot a SCRAPER?
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The story:   Question posted on Programmers (let's call it ), Same question posted on Code Review (let's call it ), I migrate Q1 to Code Review, Someone notices that Q1 is a duplicate of Q2 and votes to close, I notice the duplicate notice and the auto-generated comment and also try to vote to close, but can't. No error message, nothing, it just doesn't work.   And then I notice that Q2 no longer exists ("voluntarily removed by its author"). My guess is the OP also noticed the duplicate vote, realized how messy cross posts are and decided to be a good citizen and delete one of the two questions. He picked the wrong one though, and now we're left with a duplicate notice pointing to a non existent question and an unresponsive dialog.  It's a mess ;) A weird and rare mess, but still a mess. What can we do about it?
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I'm starting to write a book on . Since I've been contributing on this tag for a long time, I had the opportunity to read &amp; answer several interesting threads on Stackoverflow related to this technology.  I would like to discuss some of the interesting cases published on Stackoverflow in my book, and I wonder if I could use the images and code shared on those threads in it.  I'm hoping somebody from StackExchange could clarify about the copyright status of the material shared on Stackoverflow questions/answers.
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I'm looking at , which was closed as off-topic a few days ago. Just a few minutes ago, the OP radically revised it; it doesn't even resemble the original question anymore. In fact, the two versions only share about seven words and some punctuation. Here's a screenshot of the most recent revision:    So, the question for the community is this: Is this proper, or should it be rolled back?  Edit: I went ahead and rolled it back because it has a couple of answers already (responding to the old version). But I would still like to know the community consensus on this.
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The  still uses the term Stack Exchange, Inc. However, I believe that the name is now Stack Overflow, Inc. , so I believe that should be changed to that. It is weird to have the wrong name in a legal document.   Yes, I actually read the Terms of Service. You should also do that.
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On the  blog post, nearly all the images are broken. I assume this is because they are all hosted on stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/ rather than zgab33vy595fw5zq-zippykid.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/, and they got destroyed in the removal of Blog Overflow. I looked around at a few other blog posts, and this post seems to be the only one having an issue.
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Is this a StackExchange site? It looks and seems to function the exact same, but seems to have its own user system, and doesn't contain links to all of the other SE sites at the bottom like all the ones I've seen do.  If this is not an "official" SE site is it acceptable for third party sites to "copy" the look &amp; feel of SE to this extent or is this site in violation of something?
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I know Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky are the owners or creators because I came by the site from reading their blogs.  Who else works for Stack Overflow in here?  Does Jon Skeet? There's also a fair number of 100k+ users now.  The answers from them are quite informative. It seems that to get that many points in such a short amount of time (the site's only been online for 2-3 years?), you would need to be spending quite a lot of time, regularly on here, so either they   Have a ton of spare time either at work or outside of work Are unemployed (seems unlikely given their breadth of knowledge) Work for Stack Overflow and their job is partially to post answers.   These guys seem too knowledgeable so reason 1 or reason 2 seem unlikely, so I suspect reason 3.
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I was wondering what kind of restrictions there are, if any, for code posted on StackOverflow?  In other words, I'm hoping StackOverflow has a clause that makes any posted code completely free of restrictions for reuse? (Both questions and answers).
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I submitted a  and one reviewer said the material was plagiarized.  I don't mind saying my contributions are minor, etc.  However, this is a particularly nasty form of rejection.  I have written this text from scratch. It is possible that my memory sub-consciously found something I read in the past.  Perhaps this was an incident of clicking on the wrong reason radio button or maybe the intent was references are needed?  I actually search around the web for references, but I didn't find anything.  Wouldn't some additional text showing the source of plagiary be very helpful?    The only source I may have quoted was  were they noted a difference between backtick and $() to allow nesting.  However, I thought the text was significantly different and it originated on stack overflow?         Plagiarism is not a crime per se but in academia and industry it is a serious moral offence, and cases of plagiarism can constitute copyright infringement.    Certainly when ever I am writing a tag wiki I look at all the question tagged on stack overflow.  Is this considered an infringement?  I thought we were sort of a collective and the tag wiki shouldn't have to attribute the question the tag is describing.  Some sort of additional text on what the plagiary was would be most helpful.  Edit: For reference, here is the reject reason list [as of Dec 2013].    The copied content is the first reason in the list; which causes the plagiary reason text.  This is unknown to some lower reputation users of stack overflow.
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I was improving some of my old posts on Stack&nbsp;Overflow when I ended up encountering this:     You have already edited 5 of your own post today; futher edits are not   allowed until tomorrow   I know this it is not a major deal, but what's the logic underneath to this restriction?
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I searched for "stack overflow" in the search bar, but it doesn't list the results normally. Instead, it redirects me to the tag .  Why is this happening, and how can I search for posts literally containing "stack overflow"?
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As a result of  myself, the need arose to track other Stack Overflow-based research. The following is an attempt to list the academic papers mentioning Stack Overflow/Exchange or using Stack Exchange data. This also includes the works mentioned in  that started the trend, as well as two other questions on meta, , and . If you know of papers that are not listed, please edit the answer directly. I realised it might be useful to have all the BibTeX entries in a single file, so I started .
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I would like to ask for help finding resources regarding a particular programming language. I realize that Stack Exchange is designed to be more of a hunter and less of a gatherer; it is meant to be very specific. If I ask a question that is not intended to objectively elicit &quot;the right answer&quot; then what forum should I post that question to? Is there one at all? In my case I am looking for information to help get started with  and feel that I am having a hard time finding resources. I believe that the SE community could point me in the right direction, but I want to be sure that I ask in the appropriate place.  suggests that I use  to ask for &quot;opinions&quot;, but the  states the following:  &quot;You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.&quot;  Now, I feel that my question will be practical and indeed answerable; it's even based on actual problems that I am facing... But my question will not be specific enough to elicit a single &quot;AHA! This is the answer!&quot; - it won't be meant to do that. When I'm done asking, I hope that my question will have several answers from several different people and that it will be useful as a resource for someone else in the same position as me. Is Programmer's SE the place to do that? Or should I be looking elsewhere? Should I entirely leave the SE family of sites and find forums related to the topic somewhere else?
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I am posting this question just to get a better understanding of the questions that can be asked on Stack Overflow.  I find that  can several answers based on users opinion and cause a discussion.  Why is this a good question when several other requests for books and tutorials are not acceptable?
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The  has this text:     This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.   It's probably an oversight and copied from the regular site tours. Can it be reworded/removed?  Right above that text, there's this:      So each community has a meta to discuss site-specific issues, and Meta Stack Exchange is for conversations about problems and ideas that affect the whole network.   Don't they contradict eachother?
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I merged a question on programmers.stackexchange.com earlier today and 20 minutes or so later someone came along and answered it. Shouldn't that have been impossible?  Here's the . It was merged into .  Is it possible to merge the answer now or should the user repost manually?