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Update June 30th, 2025: A new design is available to view on this update post which removes user avatars from the sidebar design.

Back in May, we shared an experiment to add a live activity panel to the site with you. On that prior post, we shared our reasoning for running this experiment:

New users frequently report to us that they view Stack Overflow as a slow place to get answers to problems that they face, [and] that it feels hard to get seen by someone who can answer. In reality, most questions that will be answered get their first answer within just a few hours of posting because users are reading their questions. Based on this discrepancy between users’ beliefs and reality, we came up with the idea that we could show users an indicator that live activity is taking place on the site so they can easily recognize that the community is alive and vibrant even when viewing a static page.

One of the key limitations with the experiment, however, concerned its placement and positioning on the site. Due to its placement within the asking workflow, its exposure - and opportunity to impact user behavior - is minimal.

During this second round of experimentation, we have significantly revised the live activity panel in order to make it look more polished and developed. We will also be displaying it in more prominent locations, including the homepage, question pages, and the question ask page. Think of it as the heartbeat of the community and a real-time view into its activity as a reminder you’re not alone. Here is what the panel will look like:

An image of the proposed sidebar panel. It contains three sections. The top section shows summary statistics from the last hour on site: users online, asked questions, answered questions, commenters, and upvoters. The second section, separated by a divider, lists popular tags. The third section, separated by another divider, displays a popular unanswered question.

The new activity panel shows a live analysis incorporating up-to-date activity on the network. Note that, due to its inclusion on the homepage, it will dislocate the Hot Network Questions module to a position a bit further down the page. If you'd like to see what this looks like in context, this image shows its positioning on the screen.

Based on the results from our first experiment, I want to be up front that we do expect this second experiment will graduate and become a fully-fledged feature of the platform. However, there is no way to know for certain until the data is evaluated. That evaluation will take place in a few weeks after we’ve seen how the panel affects participation on the platform. We’ll be tracking not just direct changes in user behavior, but also whether the repositioning of Hot Network Questions has a negative effect on the network’s overall health.

This new experiment is set to go live no earlier than August 4th, 2025 (more likely, a few days after the 4th). In the meantime, if you do not want to see this panel, you may of course opt out of experiments on your profile.

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    Just a note that myself, and I think many people, have disabled experiments due to the comment experiment that is running. You may not get full feedback due to this, as at least some of us will not see these changes until they go live. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 19:40
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    @Daniel We recently checked to make sure we were getting adequate exposure for experiments. I don't remember the numbers off hand, but far fewer active contributors than you might expect have disabled experiments. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 19:41
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    @Slate that's interesting, maybe my perception has been skewed by the amount of questions I've seen focused around how to disable the new comment features. I'd be curious about the number of users who disabled experiments as a response, but no worries if that's not something you can provide or if this is the wrong place (which it probably is). Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 19:49
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    @Daniel Yeah, I think it's pretty easy to get a skewed look at how many people disable experiments just by reading Meta. I remember being surprised when I saw the #s - I expected a higher rate, too. That said, it's hard to read much into it for a variety of reasons. And neither here nor there for this post :) Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 19:54
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    This feels like it goes against the changes to user profiles that meant that the last active time was made more ambiguous. This was badged as a privacy matter (iirc). Will users have the ability to opt out of being displayed in the panel? Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 19:55
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    @ThomA An opt out is not planned during the experiment but was considered; no decision yet (that I am aware of) if it does become a full feature. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 19:58
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    yeah, No. I don't want to be featured in a meaningless box. If you're going to be broadcasting who is "online", please have a mechanism for me to appear offline. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 20:19
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    How are the featured users determined? Is it strictly based on whether an action was performed in the 'last 1 hrs' by the user, or is there any other criteria at play when building this list? Also, what is the purpose of showing individual profiles anyway? Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 20:37
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    "they view SO as a slow place to get answers to problems that they face [...] In reality, most questions that will be answered get their first answer within just a few hours" The golf between these two stances is not someone's picture on a widget on a webpage. And the part I've highlighted is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 21:35
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    @Daniel I can give you the surficial answer: to an approximation, it's based on people who have recently visited the site. That said, iirc it's not a true live view (as this would be very expensive), so there are a lot of practical details in the way. If you'd like a more in-depth answer, post below - I'll see if I can get more details from engineering. Re q2: I'm not sure I have a better answer than "it makes it nicer." :) The purpose of the panel is to show users that (and where) the site is alive and active. Showing who's here is a way to do that. And it's visual balance, at least imo. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 22:36
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    @Slate "An opt out is not planned during the experiment but was considered" When it comes to experiments and features that take some privacy away from users, having an opt-out shouldn't be "considered", it should be a "yes" by default. Privacy, unlike asking questions, is a right, not a privilege. And honestly, if you ask me, it shouldn't even be opt-out, but opt-in. You (SE/SO) can't keep forcing features onto users without their consent. Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 7:09
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    Two remarks: in the screenshot you show, I see pictures of faces. When I take the list of users, I see pictures of logos, dogs, ..., there are even an owl and a monkey 😀. Second remark: imagine I prefer not to be shown in this list, can I ask for this or even better, will people who agree on this have to express their agreement first? Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 8:24
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    If this feature goes live in its current state, I may have to stop using Stack Overflow. To tell people I am online is a huge invasion of privacy. Imagine my boss seeing this and then questioning why I wasn't working? This is awful. Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 11:25
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    I don't see why the "Popular Tags" helps. As an asker I need to know if an expert in my subject is online. As an answerer I need to know if there is anything to answer on my most relevant tag. Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 15:13
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    I don't want to be shown there. That's creepy. I don't mind the rest, mostly relatively low value aggregate statistics, but the shown links to profiles is a killer feature in the negative sense and might drive me to log out. Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 23:07

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Displaying my online status this prominently is creepy, period.

It also has no information content at all. You're displaying 8 avatars out of 5.5k people online. I'd assume you're doing this because the box looks less boring that way and you get to add a few pictures. That's not a good enough reason.

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    For that matter, how is it determined? For example, I'm accessing the site from a home computer that nobody else uses, so I don't bother with logging out. Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 0:42
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    @KarlKnechtel Considering it's supposed to show "Community activity" of the "Last 1hrs", I assume you'd be in that list if you did anything on the site within that timeframe, like commenting, posting, making a review, .... Being logged-in wouldn't be enough, you'd need to actually perform an action. Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 7:04
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    The box contains exactly 0 of useful information. Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 10:18
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    @Sinatr its goal isn't to provide information, but to gaslight unsuspecting users. Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 10:47
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    So - askers are encouraged to look at the profile pictures of random users and ask them directly using whatever contact information might be available on their profile? At least that's the message I'm getting out of that box. Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 14:06
  • To be reasonable, @talex I think the goal is to try and encourage users to be as active as possible if they want their face on that billboard. There are a lot of people who like that kind of exposure, even if that group might not include you or me (see, for example, extroverts or Type A personalities). Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 14:47
  • @TylerH I thought we talking about whole box, not just avatar section. Purpose of that specific section was never reviled, so your guess as good as everyone else. For some reason SO encourage speculations. Any traffic is good traffic I guess :) Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 14:57
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Not that I dislike being able to see more granular information about a user's most recent activity again, but that feature seems to run directly counter to the decision to intentionally obfuscate the 'last seen' value on user profiles in the name of privacy, as part of the near-universally reviled 2021 profile page redesign.

How will this feature work with/affect that profile information? Is Stack Overflow (partially) walking that change back, by exposing currently active users again? "Last seen 1 hour ago" is a lot more recent than what I can see for anyone else on their profile, as a non-moderator; profiles currently only go as granular as "this week" unless you're a moderator.

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    This stuff is so frustrating. It seemed like the whole privacy rationale for that change was a smoke screen because you could still see people’s activity on their network profile page with the same granularity they took away from the convenient spot. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 21:09
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    @ColleenV Wow, I never realized that. TIL. Though it appears to only granulate down to "today" on the network profile, not the "1 hour ago" or "just now" that we used to get. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 21:11
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    That must have changed since the last time I looked at it (which was a while ago) or I’m misremembering. Hopefully someone can figure out a way to block the monitoring. Maybe I’ll just change my profile picture to something random every day. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 21:13
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    The information available on a user's profile is not changing. A handful of users who have recently been active will be listed in the sidebar; those profile pictures are links that go through to corresponding user's profile. Colleen's right that this information can be surfaced from network profiles, but it's also true that this experiment provides more granular information than is currently available, albeit for a limited subset of users. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 21:38
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    We did consider an opt-out, but at least for the duration of the experiment, one won't be implemented. It's still possible one will be implemented in the final design, though - I don't believe that decision has been made. I will bring it up internally when we get closer to that stage of development. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 21:38
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    @Slate It wouldn’t be so bad except that you link to the profile where almost all activity is public. I’m already seeing the system’s inability to deal with someone getting bullied across the network. This isn’t really about privacy. This is about consent and whether people should be allowed to choose whether they want to deal with the attention that being featured in the sidebar can draw. I don’t care really. I hardly participate at all on any site any longer. It’s a shitty thing to force on someone though. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 22:40
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    @Slate Even if SE won't implement a GUI opt-out for it, would you consider letting folks contact SE (either via the Contact form or via a Google Forms) to opt-out so a dev can manually exclude them (e.g., WHERE ... AND Id != 16886597)? I'd really rather not have my profile featured in the sidebar. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 22:53
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    @cocomac I can bring it up with folks, but honestly, I don't think we're set up to support per-user opt-outs like that. (At minimum, even if we tried, I can foresee there being a ~4 day turnaround with current processes. After just a couple weeks those requests would outrun the end of the experiment.) Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 23:01
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    @Colleen Those are two distinct issues. We did check whether this could be used for harassing behavior. By and large, I feel that the material risk is low, at worst incremental. There are already ample live feeds of user activity. Heck, you can load 50 recently-active users right now from the active questions page. And if someone's going to target a specific user, they'll do it via other means I don't think this aids much. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 23:11
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    The second issue, choice - I think that it's important the module behaves in a way that matches people's expectations for how their info will be displayed. Folks' comments here are highly relevant feedback to draw on, and I always make sure to share it back with the team with the best fidelity I can manage. I can at least tell you it's in my notes to bring up before a full release (though ultimately I don't control the decision). Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 23:14
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    @Slate Yes, everything is already in place for a bully to drive someone else off the site and putting someone’s profile in the sidebar won’t make a bully more able to harass someone they’re already targeting. It just forces people into a spotlight without their consent which makes them more likely to attract unwanted attention. Maybe someone doesn’t like their profile picture or something they wrote in their profile. Active questions highlights the content. This activity thing highlights the people. There’s a difference. Commented Jul 28, 2025 at 23:48
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    @Slate "I don't think we're set up to support per-user opt-outs like that." If you aren't set up to make a privacy-compromising feature acceptable, then don't make one. I don't want random users to see my pfp and a mention that I've been active in the past hour on the question page. This could very much lead to people trying to ping those people in chat to ask questions, or even worse, track them off-site knowing they're online. And even besides that: I don't want that spotlight you want to force me into. The "last seen this week" limit on profiles is there for a reason. This should be opt-in. Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 7:00
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    Besides, it's not like anyone would benefit from knowing that some guy specifically is online. Showing that 5.5k users are online is enough, knowing that Mr. XYZ is part of it had no positive purpose for the end user. Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 7:02
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    @Bergi On the accounts tab (stackexchange.com/users/1042959/bergi?tab=accounts) it will show when you were last seen for each site, with significantly more granularity than the individual site profile page will show (down to the day, vs down to the week). As I mentioned above, it's not the same/as granular as what the profile page used to show (which was all the way down to "just now"). Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 14:40
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    @TylerH Ah I see it now, I was looking for a single indicator somewhere at the top. I guess privacy-conscious users could "hide" all their communities from appearing in that list, but indeed this is not optimal. Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 19:11
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New users frequently report to us that they view Stack Overflow as a slow place to get answers to problems that they face

SE sites are libraries of knowledge -- the answer to their problem is most likely already there.

Instead of adding some creepy activity tracker, improve the search so users will actually find the solutions to their problems. This way they will get instant answers - hard to get any faster than that.

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    Easy statement, for sure: "improve search". But... how? Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 14:43
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    @TylerH Take for example meta.stackexchange.com/a/400297/237989 . Having to know all the possible search syntax options in order to tweak ones query isn't that easy for new users. Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 14:57
  • In that particular case, it appears to work exactly like e.g. Google search: wrap items in quotes to return only results that explicitly contain the keyword. I do agree though that code blocks should be included by default when searching based on keywords... leave code: for explicitly searching code blocks, if you want, but not as the only way to do so. Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 15:08
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    @TylerH there is a bit more Google and other search engines do. Like searching for variations of words. In Google's case it is sometimes a bit too wide (e.g. searching for some specific message which has "Error" in it and Google returns synonyms where the text has "Problem") but usually you don't need to match what you're after very exactly. On-site search is almost entirely exact in nature, so it's great to find things that you already know. Not great to find things you don't know. Sadly, seems the latter is being offloaded to stackoverflow.ai and it just performs even worse. Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 15:19
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I'm going to bring up the potential abuse angle here if there's no opt out on featuring avatars.

We've had a few trolls with the habit of targeting specific users. Some users have recognizable avatars. Or in other cases a troll may target a specific type of user based on some demographic. Showing a user's avatar without an opt out option might be a privacy risk - being able to work out if a user is online now is potentially a safety risk. Considering last seen was removed for that reason, having avatars on main pages compulsorily seems a step back - the comments on this post reflect a good argument for it.

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    Why setting an avatar in a first place, if it might be a privacy risk? Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 7:25
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    That's a reasonable question. Its scientifcally proven a cute dog means more upvotes. Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 7:27
  • @JourneymanGeek it just worked on me ;) Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 17:16
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Have you ever wondered why Wikipedia doesn't have a "who is online now" panel?

It is quite simple, really.

  • no one should care about who is online on a platform that is built around ASYNC collaboration
  • it would be super creepy if someone cared, either as an user or as a platform developer (apparently one with too much free time on their hand).

Not even the chat needs this, despite your wasted effort to add that useless green circle (I suppose that was deemed more important that fixing existing bug). If I send a message to someone and they answer I know they are online and we can chat for a while "live", if they don't ... they will reply later.

I will leave to the other users here to explain you why on top of being an unneeded feature this also feel like a total disgusting disregard for your userbase privacy. It IS a security risk and a tool you place in the hand of trolls and other abuser, but I am pretty sure you will just mock this remarks and handwave them as you try your usual strategy - reductio ad ridiculum. It is just so convenient to pretend those pesky users that are pointing out that what you are doing is "not so smart" are just a "vocal minority" or just fools that can't grasp the greatness of the "grand plan".

...Once again the company clearly show they have NO IDEA about how this platform is supposed to operate. How can you even think someone who cares about the site mission - be a repository of knowledge - would like this feature - noise at best, an invasion of our privacy at worst?

Hotoke no kao mo sando

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  • Any truly global website is bound to be asynchronous because of the time zone differences Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 8:24
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    Third bullet point: because you don't go to Wikipedia to request somebody writes an article for you - you visit to find the content already there. This was supposed to be what SO also was - a knowledge base. But many people seem to consider it a help desk where you drop in to ask your question and get an answer RIGHT NOW. The company is playing on this expectation and are aiming to reinforce it. More content, now, and constantly. Keep it coming. Disregard what's already there. Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 8:52
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    @MT1 that was to point out (just as VLAZ did in their comment) that we are not supposed to be a LIVE helpdesk, despite the company recent attempts to advertise us as such. Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 9:16
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The plurality of last 1 hrs is suboptimal. Is that number designed to be variable? Otherwise maybe just last hour.

But this has me wondering, is it 1 hour ago to the current datetime? Or is it 1 hour before the last o'clock to the last o'clock? (So it would then have a potential lag of upto 59 minutes.)

Is the number of edited posts relevant in this context?

In the "popular unanswered question" box, why is the asker relevant?

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    To add to this: in the concept screenshot, "Last 1 hrs" is written in orange like it's a link. Does clicking on it do anything (like allowing to choose the timeframe)? Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 7:06
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    Are we allowed to report pluralisation bugs again? Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 1:21
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From the comments:

How are the featured users determined? Is it strictly based on whether an action was performed in the 'last 1 hrs' by the user, or is there any other criteria at play when building this list? [...] -- Daniel Black

@Daniel I can give you the surficial answer: to an approximation, it's based on people who have recently visited the site. That said, iirc it's not a true live view (as this would be very expensive), so there are a lot of practical details in the way. If you'd like a more in-depth answer, post below - I'll see if I can get more details from engineering. -- Slate

I want more details on how the featured users are determined. In particular, how will you avoid showing spam user profiles in this panel?

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If I were a new user, why would I care about some random people who happen to be online now, but maybe know nothing about the question I want to ask?

What determines which tags are shown as "popular tags"? Just in general in the past week? Or ones that the 8 people shown or the 5.5k currently online have posted a lot of answers in? Either way seems totally useless, except for the rare case of someone who has multiple questions they're thinking of asking, and are debating which one to start writing first.

What could be relevant is showing that e.g. 73 recent and/or prolific answerers in tags used in the question are currently online, plus 700 other people who follow one or more of those tags.

Maybe separately showing people who often edit questions in those tags, and/or comment on them, or vote on them. So people can expect that their question will get some feedback quickly, so they should be prepared to respond. (i.e. don't finish writing your question and go to bed, leaving it unattended for the first 8 or more hours before you get back to it. That's a huge anti-pattern for new users.)

Other useful info could be mean, median, and/or 95th-percentile time to first comment and first answer in the main tag for the question, or a distribution bar graph.

All of these things would be vastly more useful and interesting than a row of profile pics without names, which seems almost totally irrelevant. Especially if it's just site-wide, not specific to the tags I'm asking in.

If for some reason you want to show this on pages other than the ask page, maybe pick tags relevant to the current question being looked at, or any filters. Or if the user has any existing Qs or As, on those tags.

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We can opt out of the experiments so as not to see the activity panel. Will this also prevent the user from appearing on the list of active users?

Related question comments

This feels like it goes against the changes to user profiles that meant that the last active time was made more ambiguous. This was badged as a privacy matter (iirc). Will users have the ability to opt out of being displayed in the panel? – Thom A

@ThomA An opt out is not planned during the experiment but was considered; no decision yet (that I am aware of) if it does become a full feature. – Slate Staff Mod

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    No, the "opt out" is just disabling what you can see. Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 14:47
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If the goal is to appeal to the people who believe Stack Overflow doesn't have enough active answerers, then maybe the avatars shown should be the users who have posted the most answers in the last hour? Or the posters who answered in the last hour who have the most rep?

Is it better to brag about the frequency of answering or the expertise of the answerers in the context of this feature?

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    Why does it have to be people? Why can't it be a ticker tape of answers or other content? The only reason anyone other than the company cares about the number of active people is because they want an answer quickly. Active users is a metric used to build a sales narrative not for people using the platform. Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 18:41
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    My opinion is that we have entered a new era for SO. One which no longer suffers the flood of new content which exhausts volunteer time with triaging things. Instead, we should be focusing on long overdue historical curation. We have never been in a better position for this. Loads of identified SMEs who can scrub the site of bad/wrong/outdated content. Commented Jul 29, 2025 at 22:01
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    FWIW I think your comment on a deleted post here is completely on-point and valuable, and should be surfaced prominently. Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 7:16
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    @mickmackusa According to data.stackexchange.com, there are 23M questions, 34M answers and 88M comments (some comments may contain answers) in round numbers about 70M artefacts that need surfacing for outdatedness. This is only going to be done automatically. meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405302/… Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 8:31
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    I wonder how many of those millions are pure redundant bloat that should be pruned instead of polished. We won't know for sure until we start digging into it as careful curators. We will never be "finished"; things will never be "perfect"; the pursuit of quality is the endeavor. There may be ways to facilitate curation programmatically, but we should try to keep human decision making at the core of curation for as long as possible. Commented Jul 30, 2025 at 9:53
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From comments on a now-deleted answer...

[reformulated wording here]

Considering the target demographic which is complaining that SO isn't a good place to get fast answers, it was a good choice to exclude the number of closed new questions.

This metric probably wouldn't be appreciated because these users typically consider question closing as the antithesis of "get answers" (even when a dupe closure literally directs them to answers). – mickmackusa

@mickmackusa While I agree that that demographic don't care about those stats, I would argue they also don't care about any of the other stats in this UI. The only thing they care about is how long it takes for their personal question to be answered (often with as minimal effort on their part as possible) – DBS

@DBS Fair shout. If the point is to dispel the assertion that Stack Overflow doesn't have active answerers (generally), then showing the number of answers posted in the last [time frame] is all that is needed. If we intend to express that the community is actively "tending to" newly asked questions, then we need to show the number of comments, flags, votes (up/down/close), answers, and edits on new questions. I fear there's been some solution creep here; what is the problem that is being solved? Solve for that, and only that, without impacting privacy. – mickmackusa

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This seems fairly lightweight and nice now, thanks! .. but it also feels strange the element doesn't have any real interactability..

Linking to graphs showing users online and Questions vs Answers over some window (probably not all time, maybe 90d, 30d, today) would add something for me, and best of all a measure of the quality of the Questions and Answers, which might be getting better now that college is more underway again.

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