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After signing up for a new site, the thing you are most prominently told to do (to get a badge) is read the tour.

The tour is...bad.

  • The top summary is very generic. Out of the 55 words in Science Fiction's version, only 14 aren't identical on every site.
  • Only one of the six sections with the fancy animations is about the site specifically — the one about what is on-topic. The rest are all the exact same (except for having a different exampled post shown).
    • Out of all the things someone should know before posting, what is on-topic is by far the most important.
    • What you shouldn't ask (i.e. Primarily Opinion-Based questions, Too Broad questions) is also only mentioned in the one box.

I propose:

This page should more prominently explain what is on-topic, because the first badge you are told to get makes you read (or scroll through) it.

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1 Answer 1

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I think that this is something that you should take up with the moderators of that particular site via writing a Meta Q&A on that site's Meta.

The Tour of the GIS Stack Exchange has been customized much more at its beginning than the site you mention. Modifications from the original text have been done incrementally over the years using a series of Meta GIS SE Q&As.

Finding what is on-topic already gets linked to near the bottom of every Tour, where there is a Visit the Help Center button, but if you want that link or a summary of what's on-topic at the top of your Tour then just ask your community and its moderators to do that.

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    The problem affects the whole network—the tour is inherently badly-designed for telling people how to use specific sites. The template should change, rather than just individual sites fixing their own versions. Commented Aug 7, 2019 at 22:33
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    @Stormblessed Yet the only specific thing you listed that affects the whole network is placing the on-topic section one box up. The thing about making the summary more specific is exactly what this answer tells you is already possible and to be done by the specific site moderators. Those are the only two specifc suggestions, the rest stays rather fuzzy other than that it's "bad" for some reason, while staying unclear about what highly relevant site-specific, albeit network-affecting, information you'd want to be captured there in a systemic way that doesn't come down to changing a text. Commented Aug 8, 2019 at 8:50

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