How can we promote TopAnswers? - Meta

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Top Answer

PeterVandivier

## Organic Activity

Whenever pragmatic, I've been using TA to work through issues I'm having day-to-day at my job. TA can't yet provide a suitable replacement for _all_ of what I need in a pinch - for example...

1. high-traffic slack channels for immediate firehose rubber-ducking - such as the [powershell](http://powershell.slack.com/) and [chef](https://community-slack.chef.io/) communities
2. internal corporate chat for problems I haven't yet minified proprietary out of
3. private DMs among my professional network when I want to ask a specific mentor a targeted question

...but I can still use it to document well-formed (I hope) examples of things I learned if I didn't find good a write-up elsewhere. Much of the time I like to spend a little extra time distilling chat interactions into a self-answered Q/A or Blog style post here on TA after the fact. When possible, I'm always sure to share back to the chatroom where I've was working a link to the TA post with a quick message:

> Thanks for your help! I've done a quick writeup of this over at TopAnswers.xyz for myself as well. Please feel free to take a look and make any edits you feel are helpful if you think I've missed anything from what we discussed.

A cursory search shows me a topanswers citation in the repo I'm working in now and 10 instances of sharing a TA link in my internal corporate chat over the last few months. I don't know how effective it is, but I hope it's driven at least a little traffic here. I'll be very chuffed if and when it actually gets a new registered user participating though 🤞

Answer #2

FoggyFinder

Creating a banner and/or a flair could help a bit. One can put it to their profile on a blog, github, whatever. Something small but visually attractive.

Not totally sure whether this small answer fits here or it would be better to create a separate Q with `feature-request` tag.

Answer #3

Jack Douglas

Twitter ([https://twitter.com/TopAnswers_xyz](https://twitter.com/TopAnswers_xyz))?

Things that might help get the word out on Twitter:

* Suggest things we should tweet
* Follow/retweet/like TopAnswers tweets (such as [this one](https://twitter.com/TopAnswers_xyz/status/1219936680339214336?s=20))
* Tweet links to good questions/answers and tag us so we can retweet

Answer #4

Jack Douglas

**Update Jul 2020**: For reasons explained in the tex.ta post below, we aren't encouraging people to do this any more.

@@@ question 1195

---

Advertise TopAnswers in your username on Stack Exchange?

At least four people have adopted this and most appear on a [Google search for "TopAnswers"](https://www.google.com/search?q=topanswers).

Possible tags include:

* … is at TopAnswers.xyz
* … says try TopAnswers.xyz
* … likes TopAnswers.xyz

Do bear in mind that:

* display names appear to be limited to 30 chars
* "[when changing display name, you have 15 minutes grace period to change it back, otherwise you'll have to wait 30 days before being able to change it back](https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/85820/166851)".

Answer #5

Lennart

There has to be an incentive to be here, and that are currently only the TeX, DB and CodeGolf Communities, plus Meta if you want to actively build up TopAnswers.

Since StackOverflow is the largest community on SE, we'd have to have an equivalent of that. I don't think it's possible to create a critical base of users without at least one very popular community. I'm a bit surprised that it doesn't exist, but also unsure if there is maybe a reason for that. I searched Meta a bit, but only could find another proposal for a C++ community - I don't know how fragmented TopAnswers is planned.

Answer #6

Jack Douglas

Appropriate participation on meta.se?

Sometimes people ask whether there are any alternatives to SE around, and it would be good to have an answer on [Are there any clones/alternatives for running a Stack Exchange style Q&A site?](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2267/are-there-any-clones-alternatives-for-running-a-stack-exchange-style-qa-site) for example.

Here's a great example of this kind of promotion in action: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/342244/166851, please upvote it if you have a meta.se account.

There may be a other questions and/or comment threads where an answer or comment might be appropriate.

@PeterVandivier, re: [your answer](#a1523), > but I can still use it to document well-formed (I hope) examples of things I learned if I didn’t find good a write-up elsewhere. I like this. When I have a problem/question and I can't immediately find the answer/solution, I write it down in a digital notebook and document all the resources that helped me solve the problem, and then the answer / solution. Sometimes I don't know if they are TopAnswer-worthy or not (perhaps too specific a question, or too short? or [reasons]) I'm going to post something in python.ta now with the first thing that I see in my notebook...and if it's not flagged, then I guess it's valuable. :P

I haven't heard the podcast, but it seems to reference a previous tweet about someone telling that lie to their kids after they vandalized wikipedia. Naturally out of context it sounds pretty different and makes a catchy title.

I have no idea about all these clickbaiting and so on activities, to me it seemed merely an attempt to cast some bad light on Wikipedia (which is not necessarily super accurate but as far as I can tell not purposefully deceiving).

To be honest this seems to be a joke and more shameless clickbaiting than actual misinformation, but anyone working with advertising and social media should know this can have side effects. Guess this approach is effective, but would do more bad than good to our community. Having more options is still a good thing for similar problems.

Yes, there seems to be an ongoing competition in spreading misinformation, which is not restricted to topics of this kind. Rather, even election's get influenced by this BS. One reason more to have more than one family of Q&A sites.

A recent [exemple](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/401137/why-is-so-running-a-promoted-tweet-with-scaremongering-wikipedia-misinformation) of what we shouldn't do from our favorite comedy site.

Ironically there is even an instance in which TA gets advertised inadvertently: [this comment](https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8650/what-happened-to-schrödingerscat#comment28268_8650) to [this post](https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/q/8650). It would be even more ironic if [this user](https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/users/10995/henri-menke) got suspended for this (no, I do not think one should get suspended for linking to TA) but I don't think this will happen.

That's great. If you ever had the pleasure to look at SE posts from China, you'll know what I mean. For the TeX posts, the vast majority has a screen shot to show the output by the TeX code coming with the post. This screen shot is simply not visible. Of course, the user profile pictures do not show either (but this is less essential). Furthermore, a common strategy to search for posts that may contain the answer is to conduct an image search. Obviously, an Google search won't work in China, but I'd be surprised if they did not have search tools that allow them to look for images. So I guess one way to make this site more popular is to make sure to include screen shots where it makes sense.

I have a simple question, the answer to which I do not know: are the pictures on this site visible from beyond the Great Wall, i.e. from China? (I know from my travel that the imgur stuff, which is used by SE, is not visible from there, at least not for ordinary users like myself.) If they are, this should make these sites reasonably popular without special efforts.

@Lennart we're adding communities on request, but each community needs a handful of committed people to get it moving. I have no doubt we'll be adding big communities like c# but feel strongly that we need to resist the idea of a general SO-like community as it's a mess over there.

6 Answers