Let's get critical: Feb 2015 Site Self-Evaluation

Question

We all love Community Building Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.

The Site Self-Evaluation review queue is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter. Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.

Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? Post an answer below to share your thoughts and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!

Answer 1

How do you handle sudden growth and expansion in a mature community?

Good question, if perhaps too broad. The answer is pretty trite: “more moderation workload? Bring in more moderators”. Needs improvement.

What should be done about threats of physical violence?

Good answers, but I can't get the question to turn up in a search. Satisfactory.

Attracting experts to a young site with little expert content

Excellent.

Community Leader is not productive and hurts site growth

Good answers, but I can't get the question to turn up in a search. Satisfactory.

How can I tell if a small specialized community is dying or if the long time-scale of activity is natural?

Ok, but I had to search for an exact title to find it. Satisfactory.

Dyslexic user participation in the community

Without searching for the exact title, I only found help for dyslexic users, not help for other participants. The answers are adequate. Satisfactory.

Migrating to Reddit from forum

Excellent.

Do badges (gamification) produce positive results in a professional community?

I'm not completely satisfied with the answers but everything else I found on Google was worse or irrelevant. Excellent.

How do I participate as a new user in a community?

Adequate answers, but I can't find it in a search. I fear the wording is too generic. Satisfactory.

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On the whole, there's a lot of good content here, but it's hard to search for (or at least I suck at searching on this topic). My searches tended not to find CB.SE but not much relevant content elsewhere either. This makes the site more useful than the rating indicates: if I happen to discover this site, and a search on this site turns up something, it's likely to be good.

What I get from this evaluation is that our biggest challenge is to make ourselves found. This isn't a unique challenge with the site: I had trouble coming up with search terms that would find anything relevant, here or elsewhere. Am I looking for advice about a forum? A mailing list? A Facebook group? A chat? Relevant results tend to be buried under content that's on a forum/list/…, about software, etc.

Answer 2

Final Results

• Attracting experts to a young site with little expert content

Net Score: 5 (Excellent: 6, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 1)

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• How can I tell if a small specialized community is dying or if the long time-scale of activity is natural?

Net Score: 2 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 4, Needs Improvement: 1)

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• Do badges (gamification) produce positive results in a professional community?

Net Score: 2 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 1)

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• Community Leader is not productive and hurts site growth

Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 5, Needs Improvement: 2)

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• Conflict between two users, which ignoring didn't solve

Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 2)

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• Migrating to Reddit from forum

Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 4, Needs Improvement: 1)

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• What should be done about threats of physical violence?

Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 4, Needs Improvement: 2)

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• Dyslexic user participation in the community

Net Score: -1 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 4)

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• How do I participate as a new user in a community?

Net Score: -3 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 4, Needs Improvement: 4)

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• How do you handle sudden growth and expansion in a mature community?

Net Score: -3 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 4)

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Answer 3

Community Leader is not productive and hurts site growth

This one has(had) a title that I found wasn't very good, it wasn't horrible either. This question also only had 1 tag. I added 3 tags including a new one which may or may not be a good tag owner when this edit is accepted these changes will have been made.

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Dyslexic user participation in the community

This question is very straight to the point, but I found that the title could be better I changed it from

Helping dyslexic users participate in my community

to

Dyslexic user participation in the community

This question also lacked the participation tag that I think it needed.

It also doesn't show up right away when Google is given the keywords: dyslexic community members participation

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Attracting experts to a young site with little expert content

This question has a rather long title, longer than what will show on the google search, I think that this should be more precise.

I suggested instead of a title of:

How and when do I attract experts to a young site that doesn't yet have much expert content?

that it be changed to:

Attracting experts to a young site with little expert content

Much cleaner and more to the point, but still a long title that is still a little unclear.

Attracting Experts is a big deal and is kind of a broad topic, I suggested a new tag --> expert-users this tag shouldn't cover just attracting experts to the site, but also dealing with expert users, often times know-it-alls can be a topic of discussion on meta sites.

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How do I participate as a new user in a community?

I went searching for this question.

I typed in:

how do I participate as a new user

and another CB post appeared before this question

Encouraging new user participation while critiquing their first posts

(This may also need some editing) Also The Stack Overflow Privileges page of the Help Center showed up, and I still haven't seen this question, so I think that it could use a better title.

I changed it from:

Hi! I'm new and I want to participate…how do I do so?

to:

How do I participate as a new user in a community?

in my edit suggestion.

I was thinking that the Tag rules-and-policies should be removed, but I don't know what other tags to tag this question with and I don't like just removing tags, but have suggested it anyway. I decided to suggest 2 more tags, user-retention and established-users they didn't have descriptions so I figured that they both need more definition, we will see what happens with those 2 tags.

Answer 4

I haven't been through all the questions in the review yet, but I think that we should also think about cleaning up private beta questions, like

• Making sure they are On-Topic
• Editing Titles
• Editing Content as needed
• Editing tags
  • this is very important, SE has Magic Unicorns that use the tags to promote question on Google and other search engines...THOSE TAGS ARE IMPORTANT
• Create Wiki Entries for Tags
  • Again Unicorns

^{Unicorns were used in place of actual information that I don't know, please feel free to edit in real information on the tagging system and how it functions to increase presence on search engines.}

I know one of my questions is just sitting there at a -4 right now, it was a question that was posed in Private Beta and it was decided then that we should leave it there to help define what the site is about (and what it is not about).

Don't forget that every question on the site will be seen.