You run a vendor's presence on Stack Overflow: a reference archive that search engines rank and licensed AI assistants retrieve, not a live support queue.
Rules that get staff accounts flagged
The first four are published in the help center.
- Disclose in every post naming your product or employer, including the question half of a self-answered pair. A profile bio does not count.
- Answer the question, not the product. Some answers may be about your product, never all. Show the working solution; link-only answers are deleted.
- No generative AI. Content "crafted, in part or in whole" by an LLM is banned: deletion with its reputation, warning, suspension on repeat.
- One person, one account. No shared or agency accounts. Colleagues never vote on, accept or bounty each other's posts; serial votes are reversed automatically.
- Hands off others' work. Never downvote, flag or retag competitors' posts. Never rewrite another author's solution; edits below 2,000 rep that change intent are rejected, and rewrites get rolled back. Post a new answer instead.
- Never paste one answer on many questions; flag copies as duplicates. Posts are CC BY-SA 4.0, so reuse others' answers in docs with attribution.
| Rationalization | Why it fails |
|---|---|
| "The profile says where they work." | Disclosure belongs in the post. |
| "AI only drafted it; an engineer checked it." | "In part" is covered. Debug with AI privately, write the post yourself. |
| "Ask the team to upvote our canonical." | Coordinated votes are reversed and can suspend every account involved. |
Interview
One question at a time; skip what the request already answers:
- Who answers, how many accounts are new, what reputation each?
- Tag state: questions, unanswered, highest-view threads? If unknown, run the Data Explorer query in the templates.
- Where do bugs, feature requests and account issues go today?
- Goal: deflect support, be cited in search and AI answers, or wind down? Anyone planning AI drafting?
- Hours per week, and the date a result must show by.
Decide the posture
Monthly new questions sit under 1% of the 2014 peak. The archive still ranks in search, is licensed to Google and OpenAI, and third-party studies find it among domains AI assistants cite for how-to queries. Restate "clear the backlog" as owning the high-view threads.
- Curate (default): new questions still arrive monthly; goal is citation or deflection.
- Maintain: under about 2 hours a week; canonicals and tag excerpt only.
- Exit: almost no new questions; excerpt points to your channels, update top-viewed answers once, stop.
Engagement surfaces, ranked by value per hour
Efficiency: tag excerpt and wiki > self-answered canonical > new answer on a high-view outdated thread > duplicate flags > new-question rotation == Staging Ground review (one new question each, same cost) > bounty. A citation goal promotes canonicals, a deflection goal the rotation, a deadline under a month keeps the first three.
| Surface | Payoff | Value | Low effort | Rep gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tag excerpt and wiki: routing, links to canonicals | compounding | ++ | +++ | any, peer-reviewed |
| Self-answered canonical per recurring support theme | compounding | +++ | + | 15 |
| New answer on a high-view thread with outdated answers | compounding | +++ | + | 1 |
| Duplicate flags onto a canonical | compounding | ++ | ++ | 15 flag, 3,000 vote |
| New questions answered within 48 h; Staging Ground review | one-shot | + | + | 1; reviewer gate on live page |
| Bounty on a hard, high-view thread | one-shot | + | ++ | 75, from the poster's own rep |
Answering the backlog oldest-first is deleted, not ranked: the most hours on threads nobody reads. Join a Collective only if your technology already has one.
This order starves reputation-building. Only a gold tag badge (1,000 score, 200 answers in the tag) closes duplicates alone; 3,000 rep is one of three votes, and colleagues never supply the others. Promote badge-building when most of the backlog is repeats.
What the ranking rewards
Published by Stack Overflow:
- More correct new answers on old threads: accepted answers are no longer pinned above higher-scored ones.
- Fewer bulk edits: every edit, answer or bounty bumps the thread to the Active tab. Batch weekly.
- Fewer thin answers: downvoted, closed or deleted posts trigger automatic answer bans.
Practitioner reverse-engineering, unconfirmed: titles quoting the literal error string rank best; high-view threads are what searchers and AI retrievers hit.
Limits
| Limit | Value | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Flag, upvote, self-answer / comment / create tag | 15 / 50 / 1,500 rep | enforced |
| Edit unreviewed / tag synonym / close vote | 2,000 / 2,500 / 3,000 rep | enforced |
| Links, posting rate, daily flags and votes | limited for new accounts, capped daily | enforced |
| Six spam or abusive flags | post deleted, -100 rep | enforced |
| AI content, undisclosed affiliation | deletion, suspension | enforced on report |
| Share of own-product answers | "some but not all" | policed |
Thresholds move; check the live privileges page. Reputation is per site; disclosure applies everywhere:
- Stack Overflow: product answers allowed; "which tool should I use" is off-topic.
- Software Recommendations: recommendations on-topic if the answer meets every stated requirement.
- Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Japanese Stack Overflow: separate tags; answer in that language.
- Meta Stack Overflow: tag policy and merges after a rename; no promotion.
Cadence
- Week 1, route. On your support page and tag excerpt: how-to and error questions to Stack Overflow; bugs, requests, "why" and "when" to your own channels.
- Weeks 1-2, new accounts. Answering needs no reputation; start in the product tag. 200 rep on any Stack Exchange site adds 100 on every other.
- Week 2, triage the backlog:
- Sort by views; ignore the near-zero-view tail.
- Cluster by root cause; one canonical each, flag the rest as duplicates.
- Deprecated versions: one migration answer as duplicate target.
- Bugs posted as questions: workaround, disclosed link to the public issue.
- Account or billing: a 50+ rep steward comments the support route and flags to close.
- Daily 15 minutes, rotating: tag feed (
/feeds/tag/<tag>) into chat; one assignee per question. - Weekly 1-2 hours, steward: Unanswered by views, tag wiki edits, the update batch.
- Quarterly: 5-10 canonicals for the top support-ticket themes; search first and answer an existing thread when one exists.
Measure
Targets are self-set; Stack Overflow publishes no vendor-tag benchmark.
- Answer rate under 30 days (start at 90%); median time to first answer (one business day).
- Canonical coverage of the top 20 ticket themes; views on canonicals; monthly AI-citation spot check.
- Hygiene, pass threshold zero: spam flags, AI deletions, undisclosed-affiliation comments, rejected edits.
Output
In order: direct answers to the user's questions; posture with its predicate; ranked actions with owner, hours, rep gate; backlog clusters with canonicals, assumed ones marked; routing table; filled templates with technical bodies left for staff; metric baseline or its query. Read references/templates.md for disclosure lines, canonical Q&A, redirect comments, tag excerpt and wiki, and the Data Explorer query.
References
- samber/developer-relations-skills@developer-troubleshooting-docs - docs error pages each canonical mirrors.
- samber/developer-relations-skills@developer-feedback-loop - where bug reports and requests from the tag go.
- samber/developer-relations-skills@developer-community-health - measuring Stack Overflow beside other channels.
- samber/developer-platform-skills@github-engagement-playbook - when bugs and requests redirect to GitHub.