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You may be wondering why we are getting off-topic question more often recently even though now CS.SE exists.

I think part of the reason is that we had done a too good promotion (cannot complain about that :). When someone searches for Googles for "Computer Science Q&A" we are the top result. And as we know, most people don't bother to read the FAQ. In addition the banner that was shown on the top of the page and explained the scope to new users is gone (SE removed that sometime ago from all sites). In short a new user coming from Google may not know about our scope until it is too late.

I don't know if we can do much about this, probably we have to wait until CS.SE takes off (any help in that direction would be appreciated).

If you have any suggestion on what we can do to preempt off-topic questions, please share it below.

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    $\begingroup$ Are you sure you should be making plans to discourage more questions? How close is TCS.sx to SO's magic threshold to close a sx? $\endgroup$
    – Josephine Moeller
    Aug 8, 2012 at 19:37
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    $\begingroup$ @JohnMoeller cstheory is not in beta, it has graduated a long time ago. There is no reason to believe that a non-beta site will be closed. The recent closures (TP.SE, econ, etc) were all beta sites. $\endgroup$
    – Artem Kaznatcheev Mod
    Aug 8, 2012 at 19:39
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    $\begingroup$ yes but the current question volume is below the threshhold to get out of beta.... a bit alarming huh? $\endgroup$
    – vzn
    Aug 8, 2012 at 22:54
  • $\begingroup$ @John, no one is talking about discouraging on-topic questions, this is about off-topic questions. Off-topic questions that are closed or migrated are not counted in the stats anyway. And based on previous meta-discussions, receiving too many off-topic questions actually is bad and effects negatively the participation of people who post/may post on-topic ones. $\endgroup$
    – Kaveh
    Aug 9, 2012 at 0:32

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