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Descriptions

Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.

Comments on Webmasters

Post

Webmasters

Site name

Webmasters (Meta discussion of the name)

Description

Questions and answers about building, deploying, maintaining, operating, monetizing, and marketing websites.

Topics

Topics covered by this site would include:

  • Search engine optimization (SEO) - How to get traffic to your website from search engines.
  • Domain names - Registering, configuring, and managing names for websites including DNS settings.
  • HTTP, HTTPS, SSL,and TLS - The protocols and security systems on which websites are built.
  • Web server configuration - How to configure servers such as Apache and Nginx for websites.
  • HTML, JavaScript, and CSS - Questions about code that powers websites.
  • Content management systems (CMS) - Choosing, deploying, and managing content management systems such as WordPress or Joomla.
  • Hosting - How to use web hosts and their interfaces such as cPanel. Also questions about cloud hosting for websites such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
  • Analytics - How to use website analytics products such as Google Analytics.
  • Ad platforms - How to show and optimize advertising on a site or buy advertising for your site.

Exclusions

  • Service and product recommendations - To keep the site manageable, questions asking for recommendations would not be allowed. They tend to attract spam and require significant moderation well after they have been created.
  • Questions about a single website - Questions such as requests for website reviews would not be useful to others in the future. Any question should be able to apply to many sites. Ideally, questions would use example domain names such as example.com or mysite.example rather than linking to actual websites.
  • Questions not about your website - Just because something is listed in the site scope, it wouldn't be on-topic unless it is about a website that you control. For example, the following would NOT be on-topic:
    • Hosting for non-website services such as email or games.
    • Questions about other people's sites. Like how to search Google, or how to manage a Facebook page about something other than your website.
    • Questions not related to your website even if the technology you are asking about is often used with websites. For example, questions about Google Analytics when it is being used with a mobile app rather than with a website. Another example might be app marketplace optimization which is similar to search engine optimization, but not related to websites.

Example questions

See the webmasters tag in the incubator Q/A where there are several example questions. Please answer those questions or ask additional example questions.

Overlap

  • HTML, CSS, and JavaScript coding would overlap with Software Development. There would be no bright line between when questions would be appropriate for either site. The guidance would be that if you want answers from software developers, ask on software development. If you want answers from webmasters, ask on webmasters.
  • Server configuration might overlap somewhat with Linux Systems or Power Users.

Importing a Question Base

Due to the the risks associated with duplicate content, we would start this site fresh, with no questions imported from other Q/A sites. After the site is running, we could evaluate an import if we could ensure that it could be done in a way that wouldn't endanger search engine rankings or community.

History
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3 comment threads

Overlap idead (6 comments)
"Questions about mobile apps" (3 comments)
Domain Names (2 comments)
Overlap idead
luap42‭ wrote 11 months ago

I think differencing between who is supposed to answer your question is not a good guidance because users will often not know yet, who is best fit to answer a question.

Therefore I would suggest the following discriminator:

  • Webmasters: questions about specific aspects of programming/server configuration that are related to website creation, such as SEO or accessibility or where the fact that the source code is related to the website creation is relevant to the question (for example because you write a theme for your WordPress site and you have a question about the WordPress API - as opposed to general PHP questions)
  • other sites: all other questions

I want to avoid trying to define carve outs in site scope because questions could be asked on another site. That is how Webmasters is defined on SE and it has been very detrimental to the growth of Webmasters itself. If you have a programming questions about your website, I want you to be able to ask it on Webmasters.

From the perspective of the user asking the question, it then becomes a decision about where they are going to get a better answer. Who answers the question is going to help you decide that.

Although in my experience, users don't make that decision all that consciously. They ask on whichever site they stumble across first without knowing about the other site or taking the time to understand the nuances.

trichoplax‭ wrote 11 months ago

I like this idea of users choosing which community they want an answer from, rather than a question having only one "correct" home.

Intuitively, I'd also expect it to be better to start a new community with a scope that is slightly too broad rather than slightly too narrow. My guess is that gradually narrowing a scope over time is easier than trying to broaden it after a community has formed around it.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote 11 months ago

Or they ask on the site where they already participate and have some investment. Some questions are on topic in more than one place and that's fine. Each community gets to decide what it accepts, and each asker gets to decide where to ask if there are multiple options.