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As reflected by Can we please have a ruling about Emacs questions on Stack Overflow? and Emacs questions: Super User or Stack Overflow? Emacs questions are scattered over the Stack Exchange network. Even if some Emacs questions do no really belong on Stack Overflow it might be better to ask there since the chance of getting an answer is greater there because more Emacs gurus seems to hang out there. But this is wrong in trying to keep questions on topic. The problem is if you ask an Emacs question on another Stack Exchange site you run a greater risk of getting no answer. One way of trying to fix this problems is to promote Emacs related tags on other Stack Exchange sites to Emacs gurus. How can this be done?

Can following Emacs related tags on other sites be promoted to Emacs gurus? Can Emacs filters, such as http://stackexchange.com/filters/281 but including more relevant sites, be promoted to Emacs gurus? How and where is it appropriate to make such promotion? On metas, in chat, externally? In short, what would be an appropriate way to highlight to the experts that there are Emacs questions on other sites?

My own experience with this problem comes from asking Emacs questions on TeX.sx. Often there is not enough competence to handle the Emacs aspect of such questions. Asking Emacs questions on Super User I have experienced that they seems to get less attention than if they were to be asked on Stack Overflow.

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+1 Interesting point that could probably be generalised to other tags. –  George Duckett Mar 29 '12 at 10:25
@GeorgeDuckett Indeed, there might be reasons for looking at particular topics at the time though. For instance appropriate ways of reaching out to Emacs gurus might differ from appropriate ways to reach out to some other experts. –  N.N. Mar 29 '12 at 10:31

2 Answers 2

I'm not in favor of emacs.stackexchange.com. I doubt that very many people will be willing to take the time to browse to yet another domain name, just to see unanswered questions. Especially since the misuse of tags is so pervasive that the 'precision' of this filter is likely to be quite low. It will catch many questions with nothing to do with Emacs and everything to do with, (for example) sheep sheering.

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What would be a better way? Such a domain could also provide ways to follow the filter such as via email or feeds. –  N.N. Mar 29 '12 at 11:39
In my experience a simple filter which tracks a tag "emacs" (like the one I mentioned in my answer which I've been following for about a year) works quite well. It's pretty rare that a non-emacs question comes through, so in practice it's proved to be very useful to track emacs questions, therefore it would also work well as a separate domain. –  Tom Mar 29 '12 at 13:03

For Emacs related questions a filter like this should be promoted. It includes all Stack Exchange sites, so Emacs gurus should visit/subscribe to it, instead of checking the tag on separate sites.

The best solution would be to have a separate Emacs domain with this tag filter. This work was started, but we don't hear about it these days:

We’re starting to build a feature we call emacs.stackexchange.com, which essentially gives users a filtered view of Stack Overflow to specific topic groups, as represented by a set of tags.


What happened to this initiative?

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Having such a domain seems to be a good solution. Note that that filter does not include the tags elisp, emacs-lisp on Stack Overflow and the tag elisp on Super User which are included in stackexchange.com/filters/281. –  N.N. Mar 29 '12 at 10:44
It's strange when someone tags the question with elisp, but not with emacs. I'd say it doesn't happen often. Anyway, emacs questions deserve their own domain (like facebook), so that is the way to go. Of course, the emacs developers won't pay to stackexchange for this convenience domain like facebook does, so probably that's why it didn't happen. –  Tom Mar 29 '12 at 10:59

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