What do you propose we do about this?

Question

http://d.pr/i/FVBS

That's a screenshot of today's Area51 description about our site. It's not looking good - this could very well be a failed experiment if we don't get on the ball.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The good thing is that we are meeting the quality measurements. But we're failing at the quantity ones. Basically we need to attract more users to the site. The marketing group may help with that. Maybe someone could also write an article for the Joomla Magazine? Other than that just keep spreading the word.

Answer 2

My advice is to redirect some users from the Joomla! Forums to the SE. For example it can be easily done for Joomla! Development forums.

Answer 3

I seen another question here that stats that Joomla is falling into the "beginner trap" and low end questions are popping up rather then high level questions.

Are questions and answers too low quality

I have to disagree here, simple problems usually have simple answers and google cannot always help, leading these simple problems to take much more time then they usually should.

So with that in mind I have made it a habit lately that rather then search for 30 minutes to find an answer to a question I may have I post a question. This gets another question up that could eventually be searched for when someone else runs into a similar issue. If no one replies I can answer it myself later when I find the solution as well, a win-win in my opinion.

We should not be scared of the "simple" questions, just ones that do not have enough content or are hard to understand.

So I suggest make up some "FAQ" questions, even if you know the answer just go for common questions on the forums and such and add them here as well, answering them yourself or letting other people do it. This can raise the average per day quickly with little work, while maintaining quality.

I rarely am on the Joomla forum so I doubt I could do it easily, but I have been trying to post at least a question a day, if other avid Joomla people do as well I am sure we can keep this going and raise its popularity.

There could even be a contest, the top ten people on here get some sort of prize at the next world conference or something (nothing big, just something to give them bragging rights). It could get some competition going to get more questions/answers up while also helping bring people over to Joomla because its easier to learn, in turn adding even more questions.

Well those are my ideas, love it or hate it I am going to do what I can to keep this going :)

Answer 4

• Time permitting, everybody should ask questions (if you are too busy answering questions-disregard). The more questions we have on site, the greater the chance people will find us via search engine. Questions need to be of decent quality. For question ideas, you could look at unanswered Joomla forum posts.
• Contact Joomla developers and popular Joomla extension sites and ask them to mention us on their blogs. This was discussed when Joomla SE first started up (sorry no link at the moment). Not sure if anyone has done anything about it since then (I know I haven't). We could perhaps open another meta post about who we have contacted so we don't harass the same people over and over.

If you look at the stats below, there is a large number of people who followed or committed to this proposal, but haven't followed through.

Committed users

283 users committed
51.2% signed up for beta
10.6% fulfilled commitment

Followers

139 users followed
54.7% signed up for beta 

This is probably me dreaming, but if we could send another invitation to the people who haven't joined the Beta, that could help a lot. Ideas on how to make this happen would be awesome.

Answer 5

I am also participating in a couple of LinkedIn Joomla users groups, where many joomla users and a few developers are posting questions and discussing issues or other Joomla topics.

Although I have made some posts and comments giving the link and recommending to start using JSE, I have not any indication that any of them that read my comments have tried that.

I will keep posting the link to JSE occasionally and maybe if anyone from you is in LinkedIn could join these groups and promote the site.

As as side note on this, I see various questions being posted in these LinkedIn groups. Do you think that it would be a good idea if I would move some of them in here? Is it possible that there might be any kind of legal issues by doing this?