2 min

Stack Overflow – a question and answer site for enthusiast and professional programmers – sets out new “content health” that seeks and flags obsolete content.

Having a searchable and robust information record makes it relatively easier for employees to seek data from various organizations; however, businesses face numerous challenges ensuring this data (technical documentation, research, or something else) is up-to-date and relevant. 

That’s what Stack Overflow (developer-focused Q/A website) sets out to address with its latest “content health” features precisely. With this, the outdated content will get flagged, prompting pertinent employees to archive or update as appropriate.   

For teams

Stack Overflow is a popular platform where software developers find answers to technical questions. In 2018, they launched “Stack Overflow For Teams,” which has attracted worldwide customers, including Verizon and Microsoft, who utilize the product for sharing and collaborating knowledge privately within their organizations. Through this, the platform launches “content health” for customers.

How does it work?

Stack Overflow places a‘ normalized’ health score over every content piece based on activity recency; afterward, it gets multiplied by views the work has garnered. The score is re-calculated daily.

In addition, customers receive prompts through emails and in the feed when any question or answer gets flagged due to being obsolete. The dashboards also allow users to establish review queues (review tasks) to prioritize content that should be evaluated first.    

“We allow teams to configure the thresholds on these criteria to control the automated notifications that users are receiving to go update this content,” Stack Overflow chief product officer Teresa Dietrich told VentureBeat. “Users can filter the out-of-date content in their review queue based content type, tags, and keywords in the title.”

Next, customers can verify, close, or edit the content while the admin can make it ‘outdated’ so it’s demoted in the search and tagged as old or irrelevant.

Essentially, content health features are all about assisting businesses in achieving their data management investments.