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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.