Naming guidelines

• Use “Free, Basic, Business, Enterprise” once you’re talking about specifics.
• Use ‘Private Q&A’ as a descriptor to refer to our product suite on stackoverflow.com or with an audience that we’re certain is aware of our special sauces – our Q&A format.
• Once discussing in-depth, use the terms: Stack Overflow for Teams, Stack Overflow Business, Stack Overflow Enterprise. Note: we won’t reference the base tier as Stack Overflow Basic.

• Don’t use “for” when referencing each tier. It is simply Free, Basic, Business, and Enterprise
• Don’t append Free, Basic, Business, or Enterprise to the end of Stack Overflow for Teams
• Don’t use ‘Private Q&A’ when referring to our product suite for marketing and promotional efforts outside of our core stackoverflow.com audience.

“Knowledge reuse” is a term we use frequently in reference to Stack Overflow for Teams as something it facilitates. It can be lowercase the majority of the time, except when referring to our proprietary metric, in which case use “Knowledge Reuse”.

• “Unlike simply sharing information, knowledge reuse takes collaboration a step further by creating a system where ideas are shared, quickly accessed, improved upon, and then put back into the system.”
• “We have calculated your Knowledge Reuse metric as…”

“Communities” and “Community” are capitalized when referring to the Stack Overflow for Teams feature.

• With Communities you can help your teammates know what’s trending, who’s sharing knowledge, and where there’s opportunity to contribute or learn around specific areas of interest.
• Subscribe to a Community and get notifications for new questions and answers.

• We have trademarked “Collectives™ on Stack Overflow”.
• Apply the trademark ™ symbol to the first instance of “Collectives™ on Stack Overflow” in a document, communication, or marketing materials/assets.
• If there is a headline/title slide, use the symbol in the first instance of the product name in the body copy of your document, in addition to using the ™ in the headline/title.
• Where possible, use the unicode character for trade mark:

• Use … “on Stack Overflow” sparingly.
• Don’t use “…on Stack Overflow” unless there’s a lack of surrounding context and we need the audience to know it’s associated with Stack Overflow.
• Adding “…on Stack Overflow” doesn’t add clarity in the context of other Stack Overflow products and features.

When do you capitalize the C in “Collective(s)”?

• Always capitalize “Collectives” and “Collective” when you are using them as proper nouns.
• If you’re just generally referring to a collective, even if it comes right after a company name, it will always be lowercase.
  • We can see in Audiobubble’s collective that there are…
  • Google Cloud has a collective for its biggest advocates…
• Even if you’re putting “Join a collective” on a button or in a headline, it will be lowercase unless it is directly following the name of a company.

• Do follow the capitalization rules for headers, sub-headers, and menu tabs.
• Use sentence case for all headings (Sentence case involves capitalizing the first word, first word of a subtitle, and all proper nouns.)
• Capitalize the first word of a heading
• Capitalize proper or trademarked nouns (names of products, people, or specific companies)
• Lowercase for everything else

If a product or feature isn’t unique to Stack Overflow, don’t capitalize it (blogs, pages, etc.) If it is unique to Stack Overflow as its own product, do capitalize it.

• This can be confusing, because we have a feature called “Articles,” under which you may write a how-to guide, or an announcement, or indeed, an article. So this one depends on the context.
• If you’re referring to a generic article, it’s lowercase.
• When in doubt, ask, “Is this referring to the specific website section (Articles), or to the thing (articles)?”
• If you’re talking about the Articles section of your collective on Stack Overflow, you’ll call it “Articles.”

Capitalize user roles, no matter where they are and in what context.