Make "What's on topic for this site?" visible

Question

Often, when I want to ask a question (such as now on tex.stackexchange.com), I wonder:

"Is it on topic or not for this specific SE site?"

then, I'm parsing the page visually, trying to find if there is an info box with a link to a "On topic for this site" page, but I don't find any.

Then, I open another tab, and google "on topic tex stackexchange", and then I find this /help/on-topic link.

As this is not obvious / not super-easy to find, I think that most new people don't search this page, leading to potential off-topic questions, etc.

Question: Wouldn't there be a place for a (small) link "what's on topic?" in the home page of SE sites? Or at least for < 1k rep users?

Pros:

• It helps users to know more about the specific SE they are using
• It helps to avoid off-topic / to-be-migrated questions

Something like that in home page:

and like that in the asking question page:

Note: I just used tex.SE as an example, but that could apply to all other SE sites.

Note 2: It might be linked to this but not a duplicate in the sense that here the proposal is just a small one-line link on home page, which is quite different to what is suggested here.

Answer 1

This seems like a good use of the wasted open space in the left nav bar:

Since the left nav bar takes up the space anyway – and is prominent enough – it seems to me the perfect place for this kind of thing. The left nav is enabled by default, and even if it is disabled, the link would stay in the menu.

It could be shown only to newish users, triggered by something like

• reputation
• posts posted
• age of account

Answer 2

This is an excellent question. It echoes my own annoyance over this aspect of the current user experience at Stack Exchange. In my mind this is also the most "on top" of the "on-topic problem" questions:

• Discovering on-topic rules of a new SE site
• Drawing more attention to */help/on-topic on the “Ask Question” page
• On-topic list is too hard to find in the new help center
• Can we get a hotlink for the “On Topic” page in the Help Center?
• Can we find a way make sure that new users acknowledge the on-topic page before being able to post?
• Insist on “on-topicness” when user enters Ask Question page
• Is there a place to get the textual overview (what is on-topic) of all sites?
• Could we please be a bit nicer to new users?

I agree with the general observation that help/on-topic is too hard to find - "buried" in such a counterintuitive manner that new users, or in my case, returning forgetful users, tend to conclude that it doesn't even exist. We conclude this because:

• The home page has links to unimportant information like "Users" and "Badges" front and center, links that I never click on. This makes it seem that important information, like what's on-topic - something which everyone has to know, and which can be very non-obvious for certain sites - does not actually have a page of its own. Users conclude that this information is meant to be guessed at by e.g. perusing the "Top Questions" list which is displayed so prominently.
• The "Help Center" link is tiny and hidden compared to the other links on the home page. The Help Center contains a table of links to information which is the same for each site, like "Code of Conduct" and "What does it mean if a question is 'closed' or 'on hold'?". Much of it is common-sense even to first time Stack Exchange users. The very name "Help Center", and the fact that seemingly all but one of the questions in the table is generic in nature, communicates to users that this is not the place to find out about non-obvious site-specific information.
• The "Tour" has a promising name, but it's also buried, and when you click on it you see that it is generic and animated, lacking site-specific information.

I agree with the various proposals for making the help/on-topic page more visible from the Help Center, from the "Ask Question" page, and so on. However, in my own experience, I expect to find this information very easily from the home page itself - before I even decide to ask a question, and before I classify myself as someone who needs "help".

To answer the OP's embedded question, "Wouldn't there be a place for a (small) link "what's on topic?" in the home page of SE sites?", the answer is yes. A link to help/on-topic would be more useful than most of the other stuff in the headers of SE sites, so there is certainly room for it in the UI, not just a small link but a big one.

I was going to suggest adding an "About" link to the right of the site logo, and to the left of the existing links "Questions", "Tags", "Users", "Badges", "Unanswered", and "Ask Question". Then I saw that a new UI is being rolled out, see for example math.stackexchange.com, and I was forced to reconsider my proposal. In retrospect I like my new proposal much better:

Clicking on the site logo should take you to help/on-topic.

• The most important distinguishing information about each site is in the help/on-topic page, titled "What topics can I ask about here?". The logo is what distinguishes each site visually. Thus, it is natural that clicking on the logo would take users to help/on-topic.
• The logo is also the most "visible" part of the home page. So this proposal would solve, at least in a certain sense, the identified need of making help/on-topic more "visible".
• Currently, clicking on an SE site logo doesn't do anything but redisplay the home page with the "Top Questions" list. I would be OK with keeping this behavior on question pages, but on the home page the behavior is useless since it just redisplays what the user is already looking at.
• When I have gone months without using SE, and then I create an account on a new site, I often click on the site logo thinking it will tell me something important about the site. So based on my own intuition as a web user, I think that other people, both new and old users, will be able to discover on their own that clicking on a site logo leads to information about the site.

That's my proposal.

Answer 3

So I was browsing Super User, and I thought, 'say, what exactly is on-topic for this site anyway?' And even though I've been on Stack Overflow for years, and I'm pretty familiar with how these sites work, it took me a considerable amount of time for me to find this information:

1. Okay, from front page, go to Ask Question:

   

2. From "Ask a question", go to "asking help":

   

3. From "How do I ask a good question?", go to "What topics can I ask about here?":

   

4. Finally! This is what I was looking for!

   

All that seems a bit unnecessarily long-winded and difficult. Knowing if a question is on-topic or not is one of the most important things that a new user could know before asking their question, yet this information is so difficult to find...

• The (?) > Help center > What topics can I ask about here? route involves clicking on a menu button to reveal hidden menu options, so I think this route is less obvious.
• There's also the New Tab > Google: "Super User on-topic" > What topics can I ask about here? - Help Center - Super User route, but a user shouldn't really have to go off-site to find something as fundamental as what is accepted on a site. Additionally, this route requires additional mental preparation and keystrokes, which also makes it take longer.

I'd argue that a fundamental problem that all Stack Exchange sites are suffering from is that at the moment, "on-topic" requires recall, not recognition. It should be the other way around. User interface designs should promote recognition over recall:

One of the top 10 usability heuristics advises to promote recognition over recall in user-interface design. Showing users things they can recognize improves usability over needing to recall items from scratch because the extra context helps users retrieve information from memory.

To Google "Super User on-topic", you have to recall that these sites have on-topic criteria. To go down that obfuscated long-winded route to get to the "What topics can I ask about here?" page, you have to recall the route to get to that page.

If you don't happen to already know how to get to that page, then (as previously pointed out in comments by Basj and Mad Scientist) the unnecessarily high number of operations required to get to that page would prevent users (especially new users) from reading or even being aware of the page in the first place. We want users to read this page!

---

My suggestion: Change the "How to Ask" box on the "Ask a question" page to link directly to the on-topic page. Users see this box right before they start typing their question, so by the "Just In Time" theory of user behaviour, putting the information here should have the highest visibility.

As an example, here's a starting point for how the Stack Overflow "How to Ask" box could look:

Several points:

1. The first line directly links to the how to ask guide.
   • This should really be the first thing that users see upon arriving on this page.
   • Also, Stack Overflow has a new user to read through a version of the "How to Ask" guide and requires them to tick a checkbox that they've read everything before they can access the "Ask a question" page. But once they get here, there's no obvious way to get back to that information page to reread it or reference it in case they're unsure about something. This would fix that.
2. The first line is a direct call to action to read the "how to ask" guide.
   • Users will skim over things like passive questions or unassuming links tucked away in the bottom, but direct calls to action will draw their attention.
3. The second line directly links to the on-topic page.
   • I think any internet-savvy person knows how topic hyperlinking works, so if the user is at any point unsure about if their topic counts as "related to programming", the hyperlink is at right their fingertips to check.
   • There's a huge difference between this and what is currently in place. At the moment, the "on-topic" page is buried behind several pages of links. It's completely unfair to expect new users to know where to find it or that it exists in the first place. If this page is shown to users more prominently, more users will click on it and actually read it.
4. The second line uses requirement language.
   • Questions must meet these requirements. Phrasing it as a question or using language like "we prefer" makes it seem like these are only suggestions, which is not the impression that we want to give. Using direct language like this gets the point across more clearly.

5. Users see that this information is available every time they ask a question, and continually as they're composing their question.

   • Because forgetting curve.

   

Other ideas:

• Ability for sites to add custom messages to their "How to Ask" box to address common misconceptions about the site scope.
  • For example, Anime & Manga stopped accepting identification request questions a while ago, but we still see a steady flow of such questions. To be fair to the new users, that "How to Ask" box is really misleading. All of the questions that are being closed are indeed "about anime or manga" and they "can be answered, not just discussed". I feel like adding a single line of text to that box to preemptively clarify this would really save both moderators and new users a lot of grief.
  • Medical Sciences still receives a fair amount of personal medical advice questions. I think it'd help a lot if there was a line in the "How to Ask" box that clarifies what exactly counts as personal medical advice and what doesn't, so that more users would be aware of this before asking a question.

---

From my reading of other similar discussions, I see people tend to say things like "users are lazy and they won't read instructions, what good will this do?" and "I don't think this will do any good". But the process for checking what's on-topic for a site is unnecessarily long and obfuscated even for an experienced user of these sites. I think any improvement along these lines would be a good thing.

Answer 4

I wrote a similar feature request but this comment claims it should've been in the form of a question, so i'll use this answer as an alternative to the suggested link in the yellow box on the right: A short summary in the blank space at the top:
To avoid doubts about the new text, using the existing question title placeholder text or even the summary shown when clicking on a site at https://stackexchange.com/sites might help.

Answer 5

It looks that this feature request should be updated and improved.

It should be updated due to the changes launched after it was posted:

• Responsive Design Themes - What can sites customize and how can they get changes implemented? from December, 2018
• The new ask page is now live on the network! from March, 2020

More specifically, nowadays to customize the site theme (design) and Ask Question form the process requires to post a feature-request in the corresponding per-site meta.

It might require a discussion on per-site metas about why the use of Help as link text, the help button and the Tour as link text aren't effective to quicly find the ../help/on-topic. Also on the per-site meta might discuss why "Help Center" might not mean anything for users of that specific community.

By the other hand, this feature request might require more work explaining why modifing the homepage for all the Stack Exchange sites will work better than the currents elements in the homepage like the help button, the banner shown to anonymous users, the Tour link in site footer. Also it should consider this initiative: Introducing new user onboarding project from 2021,

It also requires more focus. I think that the discussion about the Ask Question form should be removed as at this time the Staging Ground initiative is on going and it goes hand to hand with the new Ask Wizard. See How might the Staging Ground & the new Ask Wizard work on the Stack Exchange network?.

P.S.

1. Few days ago I posted an answer to Where can we find a site charter/purpose that tells us the types of question on/off topic? including a screenshot of several elements that show links to ../help/on-topic

2. This answer deserve to stand over as it points the underlying problem.

Related feature-requests

• Could the intro banner not be displayed if already displayed in one tab?
• Could you please have a notice or other encouragement for new users to take the tour first?

Related

• How do comments work?
• Create a guided tour for new users
• Introducing a brand new, consolidated, Help Center
• https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/377059/289691 Includes a semi-manually updated liste of all the sites that have customized the Ask Question Step 1: Draft your question box.
• Which sites have customized their help center homepage?

Answer 6

There's already a link in the question screen to how to ask:

This page link to on-topic as part of other recommendations :

For users under 500 reputation, the new navbar also include a question mark with links to the tour and help center:

This is already ignored so much I don't see how linking the on topic page again elsewhere would really help.
My point is, there's already multiple question ignoring search (duplicates), be on topic (this is the subject), be specific (how much too broad questions?) and make it relevant to others (too localized is not a close reason anymore but the idea still stand) everyday even if that's just a link away to see it.

Either you're willing to know what is on-topic and you'll have a look at the correct pages and site's meta or you just want to ask your question without more consideration (most cases) and another link won't help much.

There's no harm adding it, but I've still to be convinced this would improve question on-topicness and reduce migrations.