up vote 3 down vote favorite

See How do you rate Hosting?. It seems a genuine question for a programmer but I don't know if this kind of quesion should be on-topic. What do you think?

share

3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

My first reaction when I saw that question was that it should be on webmasters. I did a little looking, and there are questions about measuring and comparing hosting providers in the web-hosting and hosting tags.

There's also been some discussion on webmasters meta about hosting questions, and the consensus seems to be that they are being handled well (i.e., answered or closed) so far.

My vote is for directing these questions to webmasters.

share
up vote 0 down vote

From http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/ :

"our fellow programmers created a sister site specifically for their pent up subjective questions. Take one heaping pile of subjective questions, bottle it up for over two years and… kablooey!"

I posted that question here because it was my impression that this forum is the only one that accepts subjective questions.

share
The problem is not subjectiveness. – bigown Nov 10 '10 at 5:35
@ stackexchange.com , there is no "webmasters" mentioned until you click on "view all sites." I did my best to try to post it at the correct forum, but as a new user, I know very little about how the site works. No offense intended, but if people want posts to be in the correct location, they will have to make it a little easier for new users to know where that is. I was only aware of stackoverflow.com until I read the FAQ, which said: "Networking, servers, or maintaining other people's PCs and contains no source code, ask on Server Fault." From there, I read the FAQ about... – Michael Nov 10 '10 at 6:21
... subjectivity, and it said to come to programmers.stackexchange.com, so I came here, thinking it was the correct place for the question. I'm not saying it's completely impossible that someone might come across the webmasters link, but I definitely put in some effort. IMO, the only way to make it easier for new users to know where to go is to put a link to stackexchange.com/sites in the FAQ so that we might come across it. – Michael Nov 10 '10 at 6:25
And I'm not trying to be super defensive, by the way, but if a link to webmasters was in the stackoverflow FAQ, I would've posted in the correct forum. It seems to me that it is simply a little too hard for a new user to know that there are other forums if they first come across stackoverflow.com (which I found via google), serverfault.com, etc. as opposed to finding the stackexchange main site first. – Michael Nov 10 '10 at 6:30
@Michael: Don't take this meta discussion so personally. It's not about your question specifically, it's about the topic in general. – BenV Nov 10 '10 at 6:35
I know I'm coming off as being defensive, but I'm not actually taking it personally. I am just sharing the experiences of a new user, which veterans can only imagine since they can't unlearn the site. If a new user finds stackoverflow.com first, it would almost be a miracle if they found webmasters.stackexchange.com -- which brings up another point: that stackoverflow is not a subdomain; it appears that there is only a single site. I didn't even know about the others until about 48 hours after posting on stackoverflow, when I read the FAQ. And yes, there is the stackexchange link at... – Michael Nov 10 '10 at 6:41
... the top of stackoverflow, but #1 it's tiny, and #2 hardly any user at all is going to mouseover every single link and check the status bar to see what every single link forwards him to. I'm not taking it personally, but rather trying to explain the new-user experience. – Michael Nov 10 '10 at 6:42
up vote 0 down vote

Here is another suggestion, by the way.

When I made that thread, there were no "hosting" or "web hosting" tags... only "project-hosting". When I tried to use "hosting" and "web hosting", it gave me an error about not being able to create new tags with below-150 rep. Of course, to a veteran, that would probably be an indication that they were asking the question on the wrong forum, but I didn't really think much of it.

I think another great way to help new users would be for the forum to read the tags and, based on the tags, suggest a different forum if it seemed as though the user was in the wrong spot (with a Continue/Cancel dialogue box)... and to do that before the 150-rep check too... otherwise new users will just erase the tag creating the error.

share

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged