11

When is the best day time to post a question to Stack Overflow?

Although I know that Stack Overflow is not US-only, I'd suspect that the majority of its users are US based, so perhaps late in the day (EST or PST) would have the most active users generating the smartest answers?

Or, is the above assumption incorrect, and there is a more non-US-centric timeframe that generates the best answers?

Or, does the day and time not matter, and users get intelligent and meaningful responses from this terrific community 24/7/365?

Improve this question
3

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
10

For when most posts occur, there is actually a blog post about this.

Looks like the most popular time to post is between 15:00 and 22:00 GMT/UTC, at least for all Stack Overflow data between launch and today.

If, on the other hand, you want to know when the most accepted answers are posted (thanks @Frank), the answer is the 15:00 hour (in UTC). I did a little playing around with the latest data dump and ran the following query:

select date_part, count(*) from (select  date_part('hour', a.creation) from sf.posts q inner join sf.posts a on q.accepted_answer = a.id ) q group by date_part order by count DESC

Here is a quick chart with this data: Google chart showing data from above query

Improve this answer
2
  • That's the most popular time for POSTs. I would love to know the best time of day that has the minimum timespan until and accepted answer. Smart creatures we are, the two are probably correlated, but it would be a fun stat to calculate.
    – Frank A. Krueger
    Mar 17, 2010 at 20:22
  • @Frank I think my update ought to answer your question. THis shows when the answers that were later accepted were posted. So this doesn't answer "When are questions most quickly answered?", rather it answers "When are the right answers posted, where 'right' means the answer that will be accepted?
    – pkaeding
    Mar 17, 2010 at 22:20
1

I'd assume it depends on what you're asking. Different tags have different activity curves over time.

Improve this answer
0

US East Coast Time, early in the morning.

Which is very early my time (Alaska).

Improve this answer
2