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Now that the site is accessible publicly we should try to promote it. This post is for discussing ideas about promotion.

How can we promote the site further?

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    $\begingroup$ @J.D.: We could also design a nice image for the community ads and post them to the metas of suitable sites. $\endgroup$
    – Raphael Mod
    Mar 31, 2012 at 15:15

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One good venue for promoting this site is in intro-to-CS classes (if that's one component of the audience we'd be interested in attracting).

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    $\begingroup$ We could contact the people responsible for those online MIT (or Stanford?) courses. That would certainly cause lots of exposure. $\endgroup$
    – Raphael Mod
    Mar 21, 2012 at 6:32
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    $\begingroup$ Rather than promoting it in class, how about asking questions that frequently get covered in these courses, so we'll organically show up in their (inevitable) Google results? $\endgroup$
    – Ivo Flipse
    Mar 22, 2012 at 12:13
  • $\begingroup$ I could post posters in my schools computer labs. $\endgroup$
    – OghmaOsiris
    Mar 24, 2012 at 8:33
  • $\begingroup$ @IvoFlipse Mining cs.SE for homework problems would also work, for nearly the same reason. $\endgroup$
    – JeffE
    Apr 24, 2012 at 8:27
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This is probably obvious but:

  • High quality answers
  • Being friendly
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A few days ago, we had a spike in visits (and page views) after Bill the Lizard shared a link to How not to solve P=NP? on Twitter and Reddit. At least a thousand of his followers clicked through.

It is not clear now how many of those visitors "stuck". Assuming that at least some will come back, what does that tell us?

  • We need questions (and answers) that are interesting enough to make people share them.
  • Sharing links over social media can cause reasonable amounts of exposure.
  • We need overall quality to be high so that incidental visitors stick around with higher probability.

Happy sharing!

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  • $\begingroup$ Definitely it would help. Even if they don't stay the mere existence of the links to the site on popular venues would add traffic to the site and also increase the ranking of it on search engines. If someone post something on say hackernews or slashdot linking to something here it would have a considerable impact. At the moment we are not doing well with regard to the traffic, we need to find ways to improve it, having good content alone is not sufficient. $\endgroup$
    – Kaveh
    May 20, 2012 at 19:03
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Do what Dave Clarke did, he Shanghaied my question which brought me along with it. Too bad I'm not a robot.

Actually, someone should write a query looking for keywords in other forums that belong here and then decide for each question if that question should be brought here. If the answer is good enough here you will have another victim, huhh, person.

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    $\begingroup$ We are shanghaiing plenty of questions across from CSTheory. It's better than closing them. All three CSTheory moderators are quite active here, so such transfers are easy. Other sites are less close to cs.SE, so it's not always a good idea to transfer, because the person doing the transfer may not have a good feeling for the target site. Anyway, welcome here. Thanks for getting in and participating. $\endgroup$
    – Dave Clarke
    Mar 30, 2012 at 9:50
  • $\begingroup$ Certainly, such questions could well be in scope and would probably get good answers here. But we cannot just allow all candidates to be blindly transferred here, without some quality control. Certainly, you can suggest to the OP that s/he moves the question. $\endgroup$
    – Dave Clarke
    Mar 30, 2012 at 10:13
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Besides talking to people directly, I think spreading links via social media and CS-specific sites a good way to go. Allegedly, huge parts of our target group are online already. We should not forget to target non-English communities.

What I would like to have are presentations slides and posters/flyers I can use resp. spread on my campus.

I have starting posting my favorite question of the day on Twitter. I have few followers, but it is something.

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There are many questions on StackOverlow being tagged algorithm or language-agnostic that are, in my opinion, too theorical for that site. One could write in the comments that the could cross-post them here. I know that often cross-posting is a vary bad idea, but in this case it might work.

I think it is good also because it aims to an audience of professional programmers and not only students.

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    $\begingroup$ If a question is off-topic on Stack Overflow and on-topic here, we can flag it for migration. Note that migration migrates the votes, so we mustn't migrate posts which have a lot of votes that we can't hope to match. For questions that are on-topic on Stack Overflow and unanswered (or unsatisfactorily answered) after a few days, we can repost them here, leaving links in both directions. $\endgroup$
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Jun 21, 2012 at 17:53
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The number of per day questions has dropped considerably in recent days, so in short we need more questions, and we need this in a sustainable way (i.e. migrating or reposing questions will only help temporary). We need more users and that means we need to attract them. SO has a large community and we can try to promote the site there. We also need to increase the visibility of the site by linking to it and sharing interesting question about it on other places like Twitter. Also having an article linking to the site on one of the news site (slash dot, hacker news, ...) will help a lot in both increasing the visibility and attracting new users from all over the internet.

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  • $\begingroup$ I think migrated and reposted (new) questions are part of our sustainable growth. Those are questions targetting our site that just end up on the wrong site. $\endgroup$
    – Raphael Mod
    Apr 22, 2012 at 11:01
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I was recently reviewing parsing questions at SO and noticed the Norman Ramsey does not have an account here. Should we also be seeking out people like him to invite here?

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Possible self action: email to the faculty/grad mailing list in one's institution.

From there it'll spread like wildfire.

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    $\begingroup$ and on the same email it is only appropriate to mention the existence of TCS.SE and academia.SE. $\endgroup$
    – Ran G.
    Mar 21, 2012 at 4:33
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    $\begingroup$ I don't think that is good idea, since this can be quite annoying. Generally people in academia feel they get too many emails, particularly from departmental mailing lists. If you know someone personally it can be fine to email them, but mass mailing to departmental mailing lists is bad (IMHO). $\endgroup$
    – Kaveh
    Mar 21, 2012 at 4:36
  • $\begingroup$ About being mentioned on cstheory.SE, it is already mentioned on the meta, and I have added a link to the site in cstheory FAQ. We can possibly set up a mod message about the site for a day or two but I would prefer to see if Suresh and Dave think that is OK before doing that. $\endgroup$
    – Kaveh
    Mar 21, 2012 at 4:38
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    $\begingroup$ I don't have a problem with mentioning it as a mod message. $\endgroup$
    – Suresh
    Mar 21, 2012 at 5:23
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    $\begingroup$ There's no need to mention cstheory in a mailing. In fact, I'd argue against it: there's already too much TCS on this site :) $\endgroup$
    – Suresh
    Mar 21, 2012 at 5:23
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    $\begingroup$ @Kaveh: I agree with the mod message idea. $\endgroup$
    – Dave Clarke
    Mar 21, 2012 at 23:41
  • $\begingroup$ the message on cstheory is set. $\endgroup$
    – Kaveh
    Mar 22, 2012 at 1:18

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