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What's the best time of day, or weekday, to ask questions on Stack Overflow? I'd like to know if there might be a way to maximize the exposure or the amount/quality of responses.

At the very least, it would be good to know how to avoid times that might be particularly bad to post.

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See the blog for activity over time against GMT (back in January 2009):

Activity over the day

You might also want to look at Jon Skeet's schedule ;-p (deleted 10k only)

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    @Marc - now that this is 2 years old, can we possibly get some new data? I can't imagine that the numbers have been consistent as the site has grown.
    – JNK
    Aug 25 '11 at 12:38
  • Looks like things ramp up around 9am EST (if I'm reading that right) - hardly surprising
    – Adam Rackis
    Dec 1 '11 at 20:09
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    It's now been 7 years since this was posted. Can this be updated with current statistics?
    – Tot Zam
    Nov 11 '16 at 18:24
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    Now that it's been 8 years and a half. Can we have something up to date?
    – iBug says Reinstate Monica
    Jan 7 '18 at 14:55
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    9 years now. Edit please?
    – user402819
    Oct 15 '18 at 23:49
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It may be the case that the time you post does not significantly affect the total number of views it gets. Think about the front page exposure, for example: on a particularly busy moment your question spends less time on the front page than it would at a quieter time, so I'm not sure posting at a active moment helps that much.

Now, to maximise the amount of answers early on (which leads to more exposure on front page, and, in many cases, to very high-quality answers eventually, as people compete honing their answers), follow these guidelines: ;-)

  • the topic shouldn't be anything obscure (preferably about C# or Java)
  • the question should be pretty easy (e.g. "Why isn't there a get(index) method in a Set")
  • the question might be ever so slightly provocative or controversial

(I'm not too serious about that, but it is a fact that more difficult questions, or ones concerning a little less-trodden topics, are often left without that many views, or any good answers.)

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    Add two language tags. Create a flame war and get lots of answers!
    – Tom Hawtin - tackline
    Jun 30 '09 at 23:53
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    and maybe get your question closed......
    – Gordon Gustafson
    Jul 26 '09 at 18:08
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Data.SE queries show the best time to ask questions according to different definitions of "the best":

Question and answer activity on StackExchange: Interactive and customized edition

For a week-long period, the answers look like these:

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    wait, what is the horizontal axis? Whole days since 0:00 GMT?
    – John Dvorak
    Dec 26 '13 at 19:27
  • @JanDvorak That's right. 1 = Sun 12am GMT. The graph feature at Data.SE doesn't work with dates, so there are numbers so far.
    – Anton Tarasenko
    Dec 27 '13 at 2:14
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    Wait, the question is about time though!
    – user402819
    Oct 15 '18 at 23:52

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