Sudden increase in off-topic posts on MSE

Question

It seems that the Updated Terms of Service message linking to the MSE post discussing it had a undesired side effect: there is a huge increase in off-topic (mostly programming) questions. (Not to speak about the hundreds of drive-by upvotes on that posts and its answers...)

While I think the message itself is useful, wouldn't it be better to link to a blog post or something next time?

Also, can we warn users coming here now this is not the place to ask programming questions? Maybe using a custom notice for a few days?

Answer 1

Update (April 21, 2016)

Note - we raised the minimum reputation here on MSE to ask to 2 from 1 (which should be just enough friction to slow this down) for the next few days.

Update (April 20, 2016)

Y'all now have 50 close votes a day while this persists, I plan to put it back to 24 before the end of the week. It's picking up even more.

I have also added a system message that will last for two days, since I saw two more come in back-to-back in the time it took me to write my last update. It's a bad experience for them, and us.

Still stand behind my original answer - this needs more fixing after we take the band-aid off on Friday.

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It's a question of audience. If you really want to make sure most people that have an investment (and, likely, an opinion) about changes like this have an opportunity to see discussions and opine if they choose - this is the best place to make that happen. While some of you do read the blog, the audience there has shifted more to folks that are more passively keeping tabs on what we're doing.

Since all of the details of what we did and why we did it were explained (some a few times over) here, it just made the most sense to set the link here, rather than duplicating everything we wrote, in addition to conveying the sentiments of folks that took part in the conversation.

While the problem did spike when we shipped the inbox notification, it's been steadily on the rise for the last few months independently. About half of the people that ask programming questions here are genuinely lost, the other half are blocked on Stack Overflow. It's not a huge problem, it's certainly dealt with easily, but I've also been finding it more than marginally annoying as MSE/MSO are my morning newspapers that I read with coffee.

I think treating this temporary situation would mean not putting a little more thought into how we could be more specific, but not off-putting about what we do on meta sites as part of the new user experience on meta sites. Actually, I've been thinking about ways meta could be better for meta stuff in general lately.

I'm going to put some more thought into it and make it an actual initiative I track on my calendar, I'd rather fix (or really diminish) the problem at the more fundamental level.

Answer 2

To remedy these mishaps for now I went ahead and implemented the suggested banner that can be used as a user script:

(function play() {
    "use strict";
    var banner = $('#banner'),
        ms = 600, // time in ms
        m = 'This is META. Go away with your programming questions!',
        states = ['#ff0000', '#00ff00', '#0000ff'],
        option = {"background-color":"", "color":"" };

    // fc = forecolor state
    // bc = backcolor state
    function loop(fc, bc) {
        option.color = states[fc];
        option["background-color"] = states[bc];
        banner.animate(
            option,
            ms,
            loop.bind(undefined, (fc + 1) % 3, (bc + 1) % 3)
        );
    }

    // init banner on first call
    if (banner.length === 0) {
        banner = $('<div id="banner"></div>');
        banner.append($('<h1 style="text-align:center"></h1>').text(m));
        $('#content').before(banner);
    }

    // loop the animation
    loop(0, 1);
})();

When implemented the user will get a friendly banner that will guide them to better places:

Feel free to suggest better wording.