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It seems wrong to me that whilst Webmasters is a huge topic and one that touches so many people who work on the web it isn't particularly busy.

Would love to work together to get some action points of things we can do in the community to attempt to get the number of quality questions and answers up on the site.

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  • 1
    I often ask myself the same question.
    – John Conde Mod
    Jan 1, 2012 at 20:01
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    Ditto. We were one of the first sites to graduate from Area 51 but we are still amongst lowest trafficked sites in the network. Part of the problem is that other sites like Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Wordpress take much of our traffic away. Jan 2, 2012 at 12:18
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    One of the questions here was about a social media site for webmasters. Someone mentioned webmaster world. I went there to see if it was worth posting there to drive traffic here, but it was so hideous after the clean design here I couldn't bear it. Maybe someone with a stronger stomach than me could do that. Jan 3, 2012 at 10:07

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I think part of the problem is that it's more clear what webmasters is not than what it is. Being a webmaster often involves coding and server configuration and database administration and other things that have their own sites, and this site sometimes becomes a catch-all for anything that doesn't belong above (domain name advice, SEO tips, Google Webmaster Tools settings, etc)

I've seen other sites do Question of the Week or try to do things to prompt good questions about particular topics. Would that sort of thing be helpful or is this site supposed to be beyond those kinds of things?

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  • +1 I support this idea (perhaps we can get more suggestions for topics?)
    – danlefree
    Jan 26, 2012 at 22:25
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Perhaps running community promotion ads on other sites might help increase our traffic. Here are the community promotion ads threads for wordpress, drupal, and serverfault. There is a bit of overlap between those three sites and ours, so an ad about our site wouldn't be irrelevant, especially if we made ads that were relevent to both communities (ex. Want to learn how to increase your drupal seo? Join webmasters.se).

Update Another thing we can do to get activity is to run our own seo experiments, like I'm doing here: How to implement rel=author on a page with multiple authors?. That will probably drive some traffic to our site.

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One method that all high-rep Stack Overflow users can employ (or any other network site, for that matter) is making sure good questions get migrated here from other sites.

For example the SEO tag on Stack Overflow is full of non-programming questions that are off-topic for SO, but great questions for PW! They require 5 high-rep users to migrate here, but most SO users seem to ignore them.

So any users here that also have 3000+ rep on SO: keep an eye on questions like these and vote to migrate where necessary.

P.S. Are there any other tags or topics that get asked a lot on SO but should be here? Maybe hosting. I can't think of any more.

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  • I'll keep an eye out on SO and use the cv-ring to migrate the questions to PW.
    – PeeHaa
    Feb 23, 2012 at 0:25
  • Even without enough rep to assist in the migration one can still post a comment to the question suggesting that they might consider asking their question on Webmasters. That happend to me on U&L and pointed me to CodeReview, which led me to explore the broad scope of SE, finding several sites, including Webmasters, that can be useful to me, and where I may be useful to others. With that in mind, other sites (U&L, CR, AskUbuntu, etc.) might also be fertile grounds to check.
    – user73967
    Feb 19, 2017 at 5:21
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I think we can all agree that there should be clarification between ServerFault, Webmasters, StackOverflow. See, Webmasters appears to be the median, since many webmasters need to both manage servers and make sure code is correct. As for promoting more interest, maybe do a cleanup of all the very bad questions, and encourage people to update old-questions' answers with relevant, modern information (HTML5, etc.). There are TOO MANY questions about SEO that are TOO similar.

We can also either diversify or centralize the user-base, by trying to reduce the number of people who make one question and then never register their account or come visit again. This can be done in a very simple manner, of "require one answer" to post a question.

That could be taken both ways, because it might increase the number of low-quality answers we have. A simple rule could be imposed, "all answers by level-one members have to be moderator-approved." But again, this can be discussed.

Furthermore, many of the questions on StackOverflow can be migrated here, perhaps for the double-win. SO tends to have so many questions that it's nearly impossible to read them all without clicking "refresh" every ten seconds. So many questions go unanswered for the longest of time there, unless someone upvotes it quickly.

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  • Have you been on SO lately? (good) Questions gets answered pretty quick and in my experience most good questions won't go unanswered. What questions would you like to see migrated to here from SO?
    – PeeHaa
    Jul 17, 2012 at 14:26
  • @PeeHaa - Of course many questions get answered quickly because there are many many more users. I've noticed though that some questions just fall through the cracks. Much less so on Webmasters, because some days, there are only three new questions. It's much busier over there and that's why I said what I did. As for questions worthy of migration, I think there are a lot of Apache questions like this: stackoverflow.com/questions/11523258/… that should be here, as well as PHP/MySQL questions NOT relating to the actual coding.
    – ionFish
    Jul 17, 2012 at 14:31
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Does anyone know if there is a way of asking to get onto the SE Podcast? That might be a good way of getting some members from other SE sites to poke their noses over here.

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  • Why did you answer the question with a question? Seriously, you can ask for people to appear on it on this question: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/91139/… Jan 4, 2012 at 17:02
  • Why did you answer my question to my question with a question? You are right though, it was bad syntax on my part, ignoring the question part my point still stands! And cheers for the link ;-)
    – Toby
    Jan 4, 2012 at 20:01
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The first thing that came to mind is this: Until few months ago Stackoverflow, that we all know is the most used website of the stackexchange network, has Webmaster as one of the options you can choose when you flag a question as off-topic. Now Webmaster is no more available, so people have to use the generic off-topic. I think that restoring the option could be worth for this website since a lot of users post questions about SEO, SEM and similar topics on Stackoverflow and having a direct option could let the discussions migrate easier.

Other things that surely will help, but this is somehow reinventing the wheel, is to have more ads, mainly on Stackoverflow but also on other website, to let people discover Webmaster.

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  • See here for more info on why they did that (meta.stackexchange.com/q/134636/160606). It would be great if we could get more questions migrated, though.
    – user6901
    Jul 26, 2012 at 17:12

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