We knew what ‘nice’ meant that caused us not to notice how ambiguous our policy was as our community ballooned from thousands to millions of people in a very short amount of time. As the initial community had some experience interacting with one another, “Be nice” was sufficient as a beacon to pull people back from over-enthusiastically critiquing other user’s contributions.

Stack Overflow began with a community of folks that were avid readers and pundits of Joel On Software and Coding Horror. Since its inception in mid-2008, Stack Overflow and our subsequent network of Stack Exchange sites managed to flourish under a single guiding principle that everyone was expected to follow. A group’s shared expectations of how its members should treat one another not only helps their project stay on course, but also help outsiders decide if the group seems like a safe place for them to contribute. Social contracts are an essential cornerstone of any collaborative project. That’s the gist of it, but if you’ll indulge us, we’d like to take a deeper look into how we got here. By resolving some ambiguity, we’re able to apply the rules that we’ve had for quite some time more consistently, resulting in fewer instances where it seems like we didn’t have any rules at all. For those of you that haven’t been following along with announcements we’ve been making on our Meta site, we’re replacing our current ‘Be nice’ policy with a formal, far less ambiguous and way more informative Code of Conduct.Īs far as our rules go, nothing really changes: we’re just clarifying that we don’t have space for belittling language and condescension, while more deliberately setting people’s expectations surrounding what to expect when problems are flagged. Thanks to some amazing efforts and collaboration between our veteran users and quite a few new faces that jumped in to help us with our inclusion efforts, our brand new Code of Conduct (CoC) is rolling off the press and going into effect across the network today.

When is coc update coming out