In the Introducing programmers.stackexchange.com blog post, Jeff announces our site with great fanfare. And while I'm all for promoting our site, there are a few problems with that post that I think are creating recurring issues for us.
First off, there's a link to the FAQ which now redirects to our /tour page. It would be a lot more helpful if that redirected to our /help/on-topic page instead. The tour is a nice intro, but doesn't as clearly explain to a new visitor what's on-topic or not.
The other major challenge in that blog post is this:
Although I fully supported this site when it was just a baby Area 51 site proposal, we’ve endured a lot of angst over it — mainly because it veered so heavily into the realm of the subjective. It forced us to think deeply about what makes a useful subjective question, which we formalized into a set of 6 guidelines in Good Subjective, Bad Subjective. Constructive subjective questions …
... [edited for clarity]
Ultimately, with a little extra discipline and moderation, I think the site turned out great. So, go forth and ask your subjective whiteboard questions on programmers.stackexchange.com! Just make sure they’re professional and constructive, please.
And that's where I cried a little bit when I recently re-read that post.
Given the site's dramatic shift in focus from when it originally started, I don't feel that the blog post announces our site in a constructive way. In fact, there's anecdotal evidence that it's actively misleading new users.
Can one of these two things be done, please?
Update the blog post to redirect to /help/on-topic and provide a notice indicating that the site scope has changed since that blog post was made.Just make that blog post go away forever.
After digging through the comments on that post, I think we should just make that particular post go away forever.
In particular, this comment is what should be the final nail in the coffin:
The last thing either site needs is people asking perfectly good programming questions on a site explicitly created for non-programming questions.
But if you do get the urge to ask (or answer…) a question that ISN’T strictly programming-related, now you have a place to do so.
Granted, no one reads comment threads on old blog posts but that comment is horrifically misleading at this point in time.
