Introducing StackWho: Discover other users on StackOverflow | Hacker News Reader

Introducing StackWho: Discover other users on StackOverflow

cburgdorf.wordpress.com

26 pointscburgdorf9 comments

Why not use Data.StackEchange.com to get it in an officially sanctioned way? You can query any of the Stack databases, save your query, etc:

http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/166034/top...

My guess is that when StackOverflow finds out that StackWho is scraping up all their user data to get around paying for a $1000 per month service, they're going to shut it down pretty quickly (whether by legal action, blocking access to StackWho's IP addresses, etc.).

I talked to them before releasing something to the public. I'll share their response here:

"Hi Christoph,

Thanks for taking the time to ask.

I don't see a problem with this, as it's data that anyone could easily mine out of the public database dumps that we release. The Careers 2.0 candidate search is an entirely different thing, and goes way beyond being able to show you developers from (area) that might know something about (technology).

When we used to facilitate (and later switched to just encouraging) periodic world-wide meetups with fellow Stack Exchange users in your area, Our SEDE and DB dumps were what people used to see if there might be an interest in any given area. Given that we don't facilitate any way for users to be contacted through the site unless they make their contact information available on their profile, I don't think this would annoy anyone at all.

Not required, but I'd love to take a look at what you've built once you have it ready and somewhere public :) Nothing official, I'm just curious.

Regards, - Stack Exchange Team"

Thanks for the clarification, and sorry to have jumped to the wrong conclusion. However, your blog post doesn't make it clear that your service is significantly different from "Candidate Search". You may want to update the post to say that you're doing this with Stack Exchange's permission and not competing with them.

I'd consider excluding the part about SE giving permission. No matter what the correspondence, I'd be wary about making any definitive statements regarding the company based on the contents of an informal e-mail.

Well, I don't want to put any thought into that yet. I synchronize over the public API and wrote a tool which operates only on public accessible data. I don't have access to all the internal data which the real Candidate Search has access to, so I could never compete with them on a threatening level.

It turns out I'm not the only Vim enthusiast in Tampa, there are three of us!

great idea, though it looks like it's not rendering on mac chrome:

http://imgur.com/SQFAor1

Mmh, weird. Works for me. Can you create a ticket here https://github.com/cburgdorf/StackWho/issues so I can track it down. I guess you have errors in your Dev Tools Console. If so please include them in the ticket.

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