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I've found a lot of questions that cover far too wide of an area to be covered successfully by one Exchange, in my opinion, and I'm confused where to post questions.

Is "Pro Webmasters" for technical questions (e.g. "When should I use a Web Garden? And how do I implement one in IIS?") or the day-to-day running of a site (e.g. "How do I make money from Google ads?") or for HTML questions (e.g. "What's new in HTML5/CSS3?").

It seems everything is all mixed in.

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If you take a look at the present S/E offerings, it's pretty clear that there is no firm taxonomy applied to the creation of S/E's ...

Consider the problem of asking how to secure an Ubuntu VPS - do you ask on ServerFault, Unix and Linux, AskUbuntu, Pro Webmasters, or ..? It depends upon which S/E's you're already using... I'm certain you'd get the right answer on any of them and, while that says a lot for the community, it doesn't say much for the clarity of the S/E boundary heuristic.

There is just going to be overlap across S/E's until it becomes apparent to the the S/E dev team that some level of cross-topic integration is desirable and even necessary.

Case in point:

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  • I tend to gravitate towards this and what @DisgruntledGoat said below. Writer's, Readers, Posters etc are all somewhat lazy, although they are smart. It isn't that the same question is meant to be asked, on the different SE's. IMO, it has to do with rep, ie if I have a server related question, I should go ask at ServerFault, but if my server is an Ubuntu box and I have 5k rep there, and only 100 everywhere else, I'd post where my rep is highest.
    – eyoung100
    Jul 23, 2014 at 13:58
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Originally it was conceived to be about the day-to-day running web sites, but that in itself is very broad. PW tends to encompass some aspects of other Stack Exchange sites including programming, server administration, UI/UX and web apps. But there are a few areas that are 'exclusively' Pro Webmasters, such as SEO, analytics and advertising.

There are several questions throughout our meta that try to pin down what is acceptable here and what should be closed as off-topic. For example, any question containing code (particularly PHP/Javascript) is usually closed and the user pointed towards Stack Overflow.

(Incidentally the opposite is also true - there are over a thousand questions tagged SEO on Stack Overflow. I bet nearly all could have been asked here instead.)

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The latter two of your examples are definitely valid, though both are far too vague.

Though "how do I make money with google ads" should be a bit more specific, like "where are the best places to put google ads on my website?"

Technical questions where technical == programming should be on Stack Overflow. That's clear.

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  • So where would you put advanced IIS configuration questions? Oct 11, 2010 at 9:52
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    @django probably Server Fault Oct 11, 2010 at 21:00
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Why is there a need to force taxonomy through domains, why not just let a moderated folksonomy drive segmentation, and allow users to manage the questions, answers, comments, etc. via a modular interface? To me, breaking out the domains just appears to be an effort to long-term sell off domains; although it could be some sort of attempt at SEO - but given the focus of the site and user engagement, I personally think it's a bad idea.

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    for why this is a bad idea, see yahooanswers.com Oct 12, 2010 at 21:24
  • @Jeff_Atwood - Y!A is allowing the question asker to categorize the question after picking from question categories automatically suggested from parsing the question string (the autosuggest feature, at the very least, could help cut down on cross-S/E confusion) - blunders is proposing that question answerers apply tags, and I'd have to agree that such a system would be an improvement over Y!A
    – danlefree
    Oct 12, 2010 at 22:09
  • What you're suggesting could still be done across domains. Oct 14, 2010 at 15:00

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