Documentation

The Stack Overflow integration for Orbit will automatically ingest questions and answers related to a specific tag. We will create a new member profile for every new question asker, and also for everyone who answers that question through a historical import when the integration is first connected, or we'll add a new activity to members that already exist in your workspace.

The table below summarizes what is included in this integration:

After creating your Orbit workspace, you can add the Stack Overflow integration from the Integrations page in your workspace's Settings.

Click on Stack Overflow and you'll see a pop up like the one below. You should check that you are either completely logged out of Stack Overflow or already logged into the account that you want to connect to Orbit.

You can use your own Stack Overflow account unless you and your team have a shared Stack Overflow account, in which case, use that. If you don't want to use your account, consider creating a shared account. Orbit does not have any permissions to act as you, or post on your behalf, all we do is gather questions and answers. If at some stage you need to change the account, remove the Stack Overflow integration and add it back using a different account. No past data will be lost if you do this.

Once you are happy to proceed, click on Connect Stack Overflow. If you are not logged into Stack Overflow you will be redirected to their site and asked to log in as the account you want to connect to Orbit.

If you are already logged in, you will be asked to grant Orbit the correct permissions to access the data we need to sync question and answer activities to your workspace.

At this time the Stack Overflow integration will only register question and answer activities for specific tags. We do not import upvotes or downvotes. The Orbit application does not have write access to your personal Stack Overflow account and can only read data about the tags you specify.

Once you grant Orbit permission to access Stack Overflow you will be redirected back to the settings page in the Orbit application.

To complete the setup, you must now choose the tags that you want to sync with Orbit. Try to be specific and use tags that are relevant to your community or product. We advise against using language related tags such as "Ruby", or "JavaScript" on their own as this will add a lot of new members to your account very quickly.

The more tags you choose, the more specific the query we make to Stack Overflow is. For example, if you wanted questions and answers tagged with Ruby, Rails and AWS, you would use all three of those tags. This would be equivalent to asking "show me all questions tagged with Ruby AND Rails AND AWS".

Only questions that have all of those tags would be imported.

Your tag choices can be changed at any time but please note that if you remove a tag that you were tracking previously, the members and activities that were created will not be removed from your workspace.

Once you have chosen the tag(s) that you want to use, click Save.

The setup is complete at this point and a historical import will begin to bring in previous question and answer activities (this can take up to a few hours to complete).

By default the Stack Overflow integration will import the past 28 days of questions and activities for the tag(s) you have specified.

The Stack Overflow integration will create two new Activity Types on your workspace; stackoverflow:question and stackoverflow:answered.

If you want to edit any of the metadata associated with these Activity Types you can find them in your workspace's Settings under Activity Types.

From there you can edit the associated text, as well as the weight given to these activities. By default the weight is 1.0, but you should consider how important these activities are for you and your community and adjust them if necessary.

Please note that if you change the weight of an activity type, only activities created after that point will be given the new weight. If you want to apply a new weight to historical activities as well, please contact [email protected] and let us know which activity type(s) you would like to have reweighed.

If you want to remove the Stack Overflow integration you can do so from the integration settings page.

Please note that removing an integration does not delete the activities associated with it. If you would like to remove all Stack Overflow activity from your workspace, contact [email protected].