As we all know StackOverflow can be an intimidating place for new users, as any mistakes are quickly picked up, critcised and questions are closed. You also see the same group of people quick to answer questions (See here for a user answering over 85,000 questions in SQL.) But what if I told you it's possible to hit the front page of StackOverflow within a month.
How Reputation works#
In StackOverflow, you gain:
- 15 reputation when your answer get's marked as accepted.
- 10 reputation everytime someone upvotes your post.
- 2 reputation when another user accept's your edit to their post.
Daily Reputation Limit
Daily reputation gained is capped to 200, however you can exceed the cap with answer's being accepted. More Info.
The plan#
StackOverflow tracks reputation gained on a weekly, quartlerly and yearly basis. So exceeding the maximum reputation gained cap of 200 for a week or so should propel you in theory to the top of the scoreboard.
The plan was to create an account and over the 2020 Christmas break when I had time to answer enough questions to hit the daily reputation cap. Existing popular questions for the most part have existing detailed answers so trying to add another wouldn't give much traction. Therefore, I set a filter for some popular tags e.g. [c++] and [templates] and sorted all StackOverflow questions by new that matched those filters e.g.
And when a new question was asked, it would popup in the feed, and at peak times questions could be answered in 5 to 10 minutes. So I set about monitoring the feed when I was at my computer and if any question popped up where I felt I could give a good answer quickly I would do so.
The result#
To begin with, answering questions would yield little reputation. In some cases you would answer a person's question and they would say thanks but wouldn't mark the answer as answered.
However sometimes you could answer a question that would slowly pickup traction, leading to about 10 upvotes. Meaning it was possible to hit the reputation limit with two good answers. Now I also did get a bit lucky as one question I answered started to trend, and it helped me hit the reputation cap a few days in a row. And that was when it happend, I hit the front page at rank 27.
