I have posted a question that in my opinion fits best into a beta community.  Overall, the attention was not satisfactory although I even posted a bounty and the limited response I got was positive. Despite currently being the only bountied question it has been viewed about 30 times in 10 days and about a third of the views seem to be my own. I believe the question itself should be relatively easy to answer for people familiar with the subject, hence I believe the low impact is related to the early beta stage of the community.  Is it acceptable to cross-post an unnoticed question from a beta community into a more mature related but thematically less on-point community?   For reference, the beta community under consideration is Earth Sciences; I'm considering a cross-post into Physics and the relevant question () is about radar.  Edit: Generally, cross-posting is deemed unacceptable (). However, this question seems to be a special case of the above. I can see a point to be made, that cross-posting is never allowed and that the beta status is irrelevant. At the same time I can see an argument for the opposing viewpoint, since many sensible strategies proposed in the case of mature sites (i.e. rephrasing the question, editing the question....) may not be helpful if the general traffic on a beta site is so low that the answer is simply not read by anyone, hence I feel that my question is not a straight forward application of the above one.
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It is possible to migrate a question from one Stack Exchange site to another by closing, but if I have a question that I think is on-topic for multiple Stack Exchange sites, is it OK to post it on both (multipost)?   For example, I have a question that's earned me the tumbleweed badge on SO and I'm not sure what the best thing to do with it is. It's about a web server so it might be answerable on Server Fault but it's really more of a programming thing, hence the posting the question on Stack Overflow.    Is there any way to make the question visible on multiple sites (crosspost) and then accept the answer wherever it came from?
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I was reading  last night. When I got to the bottom, where the answer button usually is, I saw the following message in its place:     protected by Won't Jun 13 '11 at 16:28      Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted   low-quality answers, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on   this site.      Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?   I wasn't planning on answering it, but it did make me curious as I have 101 rep on the site. Is this a bug, or is there something I am missing?
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Historically our beta site has discouraged self-answered questions. The site has been running for 6 years (3 questions/day, 98% answered, 3 ½ answers/question, and very few questions are closed). The topic of the site can be a bit &quot;&quot; (like Parenting, or amateur History), sometimes opinionated, and not entirely dry and technical like Stack Overflow. We have discouraged self-answered questions -- because, as one of the moderators says,  I'm strongly opposed to giving green light to quasi-questions posted with the sole intent to share an opinion, an unsolicited teaching, rambling, philosophical musings etc. [...] self-answering [might be] utilized to take advantage of the SE platform to push unsolicited info at the audience [...] I'm not convinced we should greenlight a random newbie getting on the proverbial soap box [...]. How are we to decide who is allowed to get on the box and who's not? I suppose the main issue here is community self-moderation or rather the lack thereof.  My experience of other SE sites has been that self-answering isn't an important feature -- that the large majority of topics, and of the most upvoted answers, are all people answering other people's questions. So IMO if the community votes it wants to avoid people using self-answered questions to preach on the topic of their own choice (i.e. by posting a rhetorical question and self-answering), then that's fair enough -- i.e. it's not a huge diversion from SE's core mission as a Q&amp;A site. I'm aware that SE also usually  and hopes its sites may become like Wikis (which IMO is fair enough when the subject matter is like SO's). My fear is that self-answered questions may be:  Mostly summaries of or references to material already available online elsewhere A bit spammy (e.g. a summary of something on the OP's blog or YouTube channel) Someone might flood the site with unlimited self-answered topics It can be preachy -- users who disagree in their answers within one topic might use further self-answered questions to continue their disagreement into other topics People (or trolls) might post extremist, unorthodox, unwelcome, controversial views on topics of their own choosing.  Someone recently argued though that &quot;experts&quot; want to be able to post self-answered topics and won't frequent the site if they are not allowed to.  What's your experience (and on which site)?  Are self-answered topics a problem, a distinct category, difficult to control or to quality-control?  How do you (do you even) prevent people posting the kinds of low-quality or problematic content which I listed above)? What implements the prevention -- is it the community, the moderators, or some site-specific policies about what content is welcome?  Do self-answered questions seem a bit spammy sometimes?  says,  Always solve the asker's problem. A good answer should at minimum allow the person whose question you're answering to solve their problem. Not all questions can be answered this way, but if you don't think you can write up a complete solution then you're better off looking for a different question.  ... but a problem with self-answered questions is that there isn't even an asker -- the post is unsolicited, it's not cooperative like answering someone else's question.    Historically when someone posts a question in order to self-answer it, a moderator says, &quot;That's not really conventional on this site, this is a Q&amp;A site which is preferably for answering other people's questions&quot;. So we've had little experience with allowing self-answered questions -- and having to quality-control or moderate them. How does a site cope with the various kinds of problem listed above, without deprecating all self-answered questions categorically?
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I was wondering what might be making my questions less attractive to users?  I get very low views most of the time. What should be done to increase a question's popularity?
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Have you ever gotten an answer soooo good, you wished you could give a +20 instead of +1 ?  Bounty System  That's a good mechanism, but they're not always right for this situation:   Bounties are usually associated with giving incentive to answer or draw traffic. I would expect that most users offered bounties before getting an answer, not after. Bounties are usually offered by people with plenty of reputation. "New" users should be able to reward exceptional answers too.   Thanking in a comment  A warm comment on the answer is always nice, but I'm not sure comments are intended for saying thanks - but to clarify / improve the answer itself.  So what is the recommended way to reward this truly exceptional answer?  Other suggestions?  I know there is an answer of the week blog, is there a way to nominate an answer to be there? Sometimes exceptional answers are hidden in low-interest questions that receive less traffic - so those will never be upvoted enough to become noticed.  Or maybe instead of a single blog for the entirety of SO, there should be an entire section called "Answer of the week" with more than one answer (maybe on a per-tag basis). Answers should arrive there based on manual nominations and not on upvotes so unpopular questions will not be discriminated against.  Clarification:  It's not that I'm personally against bounties - I use them plenty of times. I'm mostly concerned about what other people tend to do. I suspect the bounty post-answer reward is not used as much as it should. I believe the majority of people don't consider bounties for this purpose.
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About a month ago, we rolled out a new feature: . So far, the reception has been mostly positive, and I've definitely seen    posted in this form. But I've also seen something else, a side-effect you may have seen discussed here on MSO:     Ignore for a moment the specific details of the Q&amp;A pairs discussed in those two posts, and note the following: three poorly-asked questions, questions that ordinarily would have been closed, down-voted, and/or edited... But instead sparked a small outrage among the members who came across them. Now, we've known for years that self-answered questions can be problematic. Asking is hard. Answering is hard. Asking a question when you already know the answer can be even harder to do well. But that is - or rather, that should be - beside the point: plenty of people ask really terrible questions without bothering to answer them, and we've certainly managed to handle them over the years. If normal community-moderation is failing when it comes to self-answered questions, that's a problem. These are edge-cases at the moment. But if we're trying to encourage more use of this form to share knowledge on Stack Exchange (), it's something that needs to be faced. I'm presenting one possible solution below (in true gratuitous self-answer fashion), but what do you think? Would some other option work better? Is this even a real problem?
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Just ran across , which was bumped by  for having been unanswered. However, it was answered by Jeff (no upvotes), along with a  tag. I gave an upvote so that it wouldn't be bumped again. But, Community should ignore those posts, since they have an official answer.  Possible exceptions, as pointed out by random, are the statuses planned and deferred.  Statuses bydesign, completed and declined should be ignored by Community.
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Let me say first that I am fairly new here (about 3 weeks) and absolutely love Stack Overflow. At first I let some of the negative attitudes get to me a little, left a few snarky comments, but that phase has passed. I see the tremendous value for this site in the long run and sincerely do want to help make it a better place.  I find myself going for  the downvote very frequently -- currently about 35% of my votes are downvotes. I even make an extra effort to upvote good content to offset this a bit, so the number should probably be more like 60%. I always try to leave constructive comments and try to help out the confused ones who are really trying.  I truly can't tell if it is just me, or if these folks deserve it. I don't know if you guys noticed, but there are a lot of really bad questions being posted, and a lot of people trying to pass off things like "use jQuery", "use Firebug", and "use Google" as good answers (and getting upvotes!). I even saw someone copy/paste my "What does Firebug say?" comment as an answer and get 3 votes within moments. Sometimes This answer is unclear or not useful just doesn't do it justice.  I feel like some of the people just drive me nuts, but then again I feel this way IRL :) Am I being too harsh, or is it really that bad on SO? Has there recently been a surge of new users, and the quality of content is degrading, or was it like this in the "good old days"? Have I perhaps misunderstood the expected behavior on Stack Overflow -- should I just ignore these crappy questions and answers rather than downvote them?
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So today I chimed in on IPS and scrolled a bit. This question caught my eye, because it had a number in it.     Something like that I haven't seen in a long time, if ever. Then I read the title and was confused at first, because it started with      ends in 4 days How do I...   This is obviously not proper English. It took me some time to realize that the text size isn't even the same, because the difference is very little in my opinion.   Also, I don't see any reason why that text is necessary in the title.    It gives no additional incentive to answer the question It seems like it's part of the question title It's already obvious that the question has a bounty The time until a bounty runs out is already visible inside a question   This update looks better or worse depending on the site style, but overall I think that it's not something that is needed and has more drawback than it adds.  So I am wondering why this text has been added in the first place and if it can be removed again? Perhaps a per-site solution is possible. I am open to discussion about it (mostly interested in what that text adds to the user experience).
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Are the questions submitted on SO and other SE sites initialized with 1 view, or does the first view belong to the user who posted it?  Why is a question given a free first view? It just appears, as soon as the question is published.
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I don't know about you, but to me happens a lot: if I'm reading a question with a LOT of answers, (specially in a really specific question) I just read the most voted up: that's the way the system was made to be, and it's really good. The most relevant voted by the community are the first ones.  Since we have TOO many users, and a lot of them are reading the same questions and answering them almost at the same time, do you think the "urge" to be the first to answer a question and so gain reputation points makes people sometimes write things too fast and not try to really elaborate a really helpful answer? We may think: "people aren't going to read all answers, so I need to be really concerned about how fast I'm to answer". Are we incentivating "objective answers", or "not so good but objective and good to be voted up"?  I'm not trying to be unfair with all answers people here provide, we have really good ones here. But supose what I wrote above is a reality: what you think it would happen if it was a "time delay" between an "up-vote or down-vote" and it's sum in the answer? Summarizing: what if the sum wasn't almost "real time"?
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Some sites appear far more often in the hot questions list than other sites. I don't have any hard data on that, as that kind of data is just not publicly available, but I'm pretty sure my subjective impression on that is reasonably accurate.  Those sites don't appear more often because they are inherently more interesting, but because they have certain voting and answering patterns that favor them in the hot questions algorithm. I would argue that the goal of the hot questions list is to present questions from a large variety of SE sites to the whole network, and to show possibly interesting questions to users that would not have found them otherwise.   To achieve this goal, the spots in the hot questions list should be distributed among all SE sites. The algorithm should try to get a good sampling of all sites, and it should try to normalize the results for varying voting behaviour. At the moment, sites that intrinsically get more votes and more answers per question seem favored in the algorithm.  So I think one part of the algorithm should try to identify questions that get an unusally high amount of votes and views for that site, and give the smaller sites a chance this way.  I'm not sure on how exactly this weighting should be done, as a complete normalization would likely not work across the huge difference in scale for all the SE sites.  As a specific example that the current algorithm is broken I'll present . I don't think any site should occupy a third of the whole list.   Here's another instance where one site is overrepresented at the top of the list:
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I posted . I think it was probably a better fit for the , but for the reasons I cited in my question, I posted it on SO.     I deliberated whether to post this on code review or here. I came to   the conclusion that it is a straightforward question about PHP and   with the number of supporters here, it would likely get an answer, as   code review is slow and the question has a greater chance of not being   answered.   The answers and feedback have been amazing and, I believe, will add another good resource for visitors to the site.  I have attempted to be active on the Code Review SE, but there is not a great deal of interaction.   Can anyone suggest a way to support our Beta sites and yet still get good answers?
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I am new to Stack Exchange.  Math and physics newsletters get to my inbox every Thursday, and every Thursday there are 5-day-old answers to questions as I read them for the first time.  Too often a question of interest  has already been closed because of the low quality of recent answers and comments.  I have no reputation, and to do almost anything requires more reputation than I have.  Nothing I have found in Help helps (however I noted one user submitted an "answer" because he said he did not have the reputation to comment.  I have started wondering if Joseph Heller is looking over my shoulder.  Any help, please?  Thank you to those who made useful suggestions.  The question, "How does a new user begin using Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange?," clearly expressed my difficulties.  I would close the question if I knew how.  Good night.
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I came across  today in a separate question:     The only thing holding [Code Review] back from graduating is the lack of high rep users - there just aren't enough 1k+, 3k+ users on the site, and it can't quite yet sustain an election. Every single thing about CR is ready but that - it's really just a matter of time at this point (and, well, voting).   Almost all the posts about what the criteria for graduation are vague and don't mention specific examples:       The first question specifically asks about 2 beta (now graduated) sites, but the answer is more general, "Look at this blog" with general guidance.  How often are site stats reviewed by the team in charge of betas? And is it appropriate to create meta questions asking where a site stands to get feedback to the community on how to improve?
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I'm happy to see the "first posts" facet arriving on the Beta Review system.  I like that it encourages reviewers to make a decisive move on a question or answer, but frankly, I think there should be a No vote, but okay option in addition to the I'm done and Not sure ones.  I think that there are some posts that are perfectly acceptable, but that show no demonstrable lack of effort or lack of clarity that might warrant a downvote.  I am a firm advocate for voting good quality posts up, I just think that forcing an option of voting or making the reviewer throw their work back into the pool untouched (assuming no edits or flags, etc. are needed) may be detrimental in the long term.
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Regarding , made by me, and general questions in this matter. I did receive decent answers on the question that was asked, but it wasn't asked clear enough by me I now see. I do not want to invalidate the answers by completely restructuring the question. Should one post a new question ignoring the other? or Should one refer to their old post and writing a short &quot;because x I reposted this...&quot;?