What are the best days of the week and times of the day to post a question at StackOverflow.com?

It seems like a simple question, but it’s surprisingly nuanced. I asked ChatGPT’s latest version, 4o, and its answer made me laugh out loud. First off, the T-SQL is terrible: it creates a completely unnecessary temp table. However, a bit of congratulations are in order: at least ChatGPT is trained on the Stack Overflow database schema, and it understood that you have to filter for PostTypeId = 1 for questions (and even put a comment indicating that!)

ChatGPT’s answer assumes that our criteria for a good question is the question’s Score – and I think that’s not a bad assumption to make. After all, a lot of people use Stack Overflow as a game, trying to maximize their reputations. However, let’s assume that we post questions in order to get answers.

I followed up by asking ChatGPT:

What are the best days of the week and times of the day to get good answers quickly?

Again, ChatGPT gets a low score for its generated T-SQL, a high score for understanding the database without additional training, and a flat out failure for botching the query and the results:

So, with that in mind, can you do better than ChatGPT?

Any size version of the Stack Overflow database will work for this exercise. (ChatGPT’s query even fails on the tiny 10GB version.)

For this exercise, I’m not expecting a specific “right” or “wrong” answer – instead, for this one, you’re probably going to have a good time sharing your answer in the comments, and comparing your answer to that of others. Feel free to put your queries in a Github Gist, and include that link in your comments. I’ll check back next week with my thoughts. Have fun!