How To Copy Code Page Template And Copy Into Several Pages Stack Overflow

[Ed. annotation: While we accept some time to residuum upwards over the holidays and prepare for side by side year, nosotros are re-publishing our top ten posts for the year. Delight relish our favorite work this yr and we'll see yous in 2022.]

They say in that location'southward a kernel of truth backside every joke. In the case of our contempo April Fools gag, it might exist more like an unabridged cob, peradventure a bushel of truth. Nosotros wanted to encompass a archetype Stack Overflow meme and tweak one of our core principles. Our company was inspired past the founders frustration with websites that kept answers to coding questions backside paywalls. What would the world look like if nosotros suddenly decided to monetize the act of copying lawmaking from Stack Overflow?

Ok, jokes over, promise everyone had a proficient express mirth and no i got too freaked out. But wait, there's more. One time nosotros ready a arrangement to react every time someone typed Command+C, we realized in that location was also an opportunity to learn near how people use our site. We were able to catalog every re-create command made on Stack Overflow over the course of 2 weeks, and here's what we found.

Y'all are not alone

I out of every 4 users who visits a Stack Overflow question copies something within 5 minutes of striking the page. That adds upwardly to 40,623,987 copies across 7,305,042 posts and comments between March 26th and Apr 9th. People copy from answers nigh ten times as often as they do from questions and most 35 times equally often every bit they do from comments. People copy from code blocks more than ten times as oftentimes as they practise from the surrounding text, and surprisingly, we see more copies being made on questions without accepted answers than we do on questions which are accustomed.

So, if you've e'er felt bad virtually copying lawmaking from our site instead of writing information technology from scratch, forgive yourself! Why recreate the wheel when someone else has done the difficult piece of work? Nosotros telephone call this knowledge reuse – you're reusing what others accept already learned, created, and proven. Knowledge reuse isn't a bad affair – it helps you learn, become working code faster, and reduces your frustration. Our whole site runs on noesis reuse – it's the altruistic mentorship that makes Stack Overflow such a powerful customs.

You can stand up on the shoulders of giants and use their prior lessons learned to build new things of value. You lot should even so follow some basic best practices to foreclose bugs or prophylactic bug from sneaking into your code when copying, so make certain you brainwash yourself earlier grabbing and pasting. And of course, be aware that some code requires a certain license to use. Across that, we encourage everyone to share in the benefits of what the customs has created.

That's the loftier level TL;DR, only for folks who desire a deep dive into all the things nosotros learned while studying the re-create information, please read on for some marvelous insights and charts from David Gibson, a data analyst on our product marketing squad. If yous want to hear about how we built the software modal and concrete keyboard behind our April Fools joke, check out the podcast below.

Every bit someone who has been unapologetically copying from Stack Overflow for years, I was not surprised to run into the millions of copy events rolling in. What did surprise me was the number of questions we could finally answer. How many people really are copying from Stack Overflow? Are people only copying code? Are people more likely to copy the accepted answer?

To add some direction to the analysis, the team and I came up with a listing of questions that we wanted to answer. What started equally a joke has snowballed into a worthwhile exploration, producing new insights and sparking many internal conversations about how we tin continue to introduce our public platform and bring more than value to Stack Overflow for Teams.

The information

Using our homegrown web tracking tool, we created custom events to capture when a user copied from the site. With these events nosotros were able to capture many different attributes; tags, question answer or annotate, lawmaking block or plain text, copier reputation and mail service score, region, and if the mail service was accustomed or not. Nosotros pretty much captured everything except the actual text beingness copied.

We collected data for two full weeks, from March 26th 2021 to Apr 9th 2021. The following analysis is based on the behavior during that time.

Questions

Ben already mentioned some of the high-level stats that speedily proved what people had long joked virtually: anybody is copying from Stack Overflow. We also speedily realized that the overall re-create behavior closely followed what we already knew near our site traffic. Nigh copies occurred during the work calendar week and during working hours. Our largest geographies make up the bulk of copies; Asia 33%, Europe 30%, and North America 26%. Finally, 86% of all copies came from anonymous users, aka users with 0 rep.

Things started to get more interesting when we asked more detailed questions about who was copying and what they were copying.

Are higher rep users copying more than?

To start, we wanted to see if our higher reputation users are copying more.

We can come across that the majority of copies are coming from users with 0 reputation. These are our anonymous users because you immediately get 1 rep by creating an business relationship. It is possible that some of these copies are from users with an business relationship but are not logged in. Unfortunately, there is not a way for u.s.a. to test this theory.

Since the majority of the users on our platform have a lower rep, let'due south remove the groupings to see if we can normalize our data. By looking at Count of Copies Per User instead of Full Copies, nosotros can see the average number of copies a user makes by their reputation.

When looking at this visualization, it appears that every bit Reputation increases, the Count of Copies Per User decreases. Then the higher a user's reputation, the less often they are copying. This relationship is nowadays but is not very strong, so I am non confident in proverb either higher or lower reputation users copy more than. Developers who are learning often have a lower reputation and are looking for things that can accelerate their learning and get them started quickly. Equally developers build their expertise, they also build their reputation, and they focus on more precise challenges, things that may not be possible to copy from Stack Overflow.

Are accepted posts copied more?

When we think of an accustomed answer, we may think it is the best 1, and infer information technology is copied much more non-accepted answers. Looking at the information, however, we find 52.4% of copies come from answers that are not accepted. But on average, accepted answers get 7 copies per unique post while non-accepted answers get 5 copies per unique mail. So more copies come up from non-accepted answers, merely there is college knowledge reuse from accepted answers. At Stack Overflow, nosotros define noesis reuse as reusing what others have already learned, created, and proved.

Reply accustomed	Total copies	Unique posts	Per centum	Copies per mail
FALSE	18,773,517	3,934,860	52.44	5
TRUE	17,028,108	2,614,073	47.56	7

It is worth noting that a question may not fifty-fifty have an accepted answer. Have this respond: it has nearly 4,984 up-votes and was copied 7,943 unique times during our study, but is non accepted. Actually, none of the answers take been accepted. It could be because the question poster has not been seen since 2010, just as well many of the other answers are valid.

Are higher scored posts copied more than?

So if accepted answers are not copied more, then answers with a higher score answers must exist copied more, right? Let's notice out!

Nosotros see for Answers it seems to be pretty evenly split beyond our divers score groupings from ane to one thousand. Every bit for questions, the majority of copies are from posts with 1-five points. I suspect that is considering users are copying the question to reproduce it and somewhen post an reply.

Similar to when looking at user reputation, the majority of posts on the site have a lower score. To normalize this, let's await at the copies per mail.

We tin patently see that every bit a post increases in Mail Score and so does the Copies Per Postal service. This makes sense because as a mail service increases in score it is more probable that the cognition is existence reused by our community.

Do people copy downvoted answers?

Merely what nearly those blue dots with a negative score? Why would anyone copy down-voted answers? Well, we never desire to judge a book by its cover.

Take a look at this answer. It was our nigh copied downwards-voted answer with a score of -2 and a total of 288 copies. Looking closer, information technology appears to be a more concise version of the accepted reply in a higher place it that has a score of 29 and had a total of 493 copies. Although our negative score post did non have more copies, it is the perfect example of a "too long didn't read" postal service.

What are the most copied tags?

Now for the question I was near excited to answer: what tags are being copied the near? Unfortunately, due to the scale of the data and bachelor resources, I was unable to parse out nested tags. For example, the html tag will non include posts within the |html|css| tag grouping.

Top ten tags copied

Tags	Full Copies	Unique Posts	Copies Per Posts
\|html\|css\|	265,143	36,198	7
\|javascript\|	245,709	33,419	7
\|python\|	232,077	35,852	half dozen
\|python\|pandas\|	222,643	19,220	12
\|javascript\|jquery\|	177,353	26,696	7
\|python\|pandas\|dataframe\|	146,731	7,728	nineteen
\|python\|matplotlib\|	138,404	eight,045	17
\|git\|	135,480	ix,682	fourteen
\|php\|	117,373	20,771	6
\|jquery\|	111,454	15,058	7

Top ten tags with about copies per post

In add-on to looking at the tags with the virtually copies, I wanted to see what tags have the highest copies per postal service. Filtering for tags with at least ten unique posts, we can plainly see as tags become more than specific, they receive more Copies Per Postal service.

Tags	Total Copies	Unique Posts	Copies Per Posts
\|python\|suppress-warnings\|	5,031	10	503
\|node.js\|npm\|npm-install\|npm-starting time\|npm-live-server\|	iv,925	xi	448
\|python\|graph\|matplotlib\|plot\|visualization\|	12,650	29	436
\|sql\|sql-server\|tsql\|system-tables\|	eight,590	20	430
\|windows\|cmd\|localhost\|port\|command-prompt\|	10,915	26	420

What are the most copied posts?

Now to respond the question I am certain many of you are interested in. What postal service received the most copies?

Answer with code cake

With a post score of 3,497 and 11,829 copies, I am happy to denote that How to iterate over rows in a DataFrame in Pandas received the nigh copies. Answered in 2013, this question continues to assist thousands of people each week.

Answer plain text

As for the most copied respond with plain text, we have TypeError: this.getOptions is non a function [closed] with a post score of 218 and one,570 total copies. Although we were unable to confirm this I suspect that the `sass-loader@10.1.i` is being copied.

Question code cake

And the most copied question with a mail score of ii,147 and iii,665 copies, we have How to create an HTML button that acts like a link?

Question plain text

Finally, the most copied question with obviously text with a post score of 322 and 261 copies, we accept Updates were rejected considering the tip of your current branch is behind its remote counterpart. This one is a little tricky because there are a handful of git commands not in code blocks that could easily be the copied role of the question. Merely equally we are not capturing the really copied text, we cannot confirm this.

Comment

It'south important that answers are not everything on Stack Overflow. Sometimes all y'all need is 1 useful comment. Here are the near copied comments!

The commencement comment is our most copied comment beyond the site, and the second comment is our "unsung hero" as it merely has a post score of five merely was our sixth most copied comment.

UPDATE: There has been a lot of interest in purchasing a real life version of our prank. The good news is we anticipated this might happen and we've been working on something along these lines. Stay tuned for more than!

Tags: april fools, copying code, data science