The Answerama front page doesn't say anything about what Answerama is. Please add:

  • A link to the about page
  • A link to the FAQ
  • Ideally, some kind of one-line summary right there on the page that tries to steer users towards Stack Exchange's ideal. First draft suggestion (below “Ask and answer all your Futurama questions, provided by Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange”):

    the place to look for an in-depth answer, or contribute one

We are inundated by new users who have never seen Stack Exchange before and aren't producing what we consider quality content. It's not really fair to hold it against them if we don't try to reach out to explain.

closed as too localized by Adam Lear May 27 '13 at 23:59



Welcome to what Stack Overflow moderators have each and every day :) Seriously though, for those people who actually care to read, there's a pretty prominent Rules link on Answerama, and those rules are actually fairly detailed about SE rules, and they also link to the FAQ.

Lots of what hit you tonight were just people who saw

blah blah WIN blah blah FREE blah blah JUST POST A QUESTION

on Facebook, and unsurprisingly, crap rained from the skies. Although a few good things did come out of it, too.

We can probably learn a lot from this influx, but I wouldn't take it too seriously. Here's an answerama.com network graph:

enter image description here

(times are UTC; the Facebook post was at 18:03). There was a big spike of course, but it's not like this sh load of stuff that was dumped on scifi.se is going to continue like in the first 30 minutes.

If anything, some of those people new to the system who came here today and who actually found it nice that on some random internet forum you suddenly get asked "Do you have a reference for this? Can you back up this claim?" may turn out to explore the site more and turn into avid users. Other Futurama fans who notice the site may have the same "fate".

I wouldn't worry about what happened tonight; it's not exemplary. And while we're at it, a big shoutout to you, the other moderators, and the community for handling it an awesome and helpful way.

We'll of course keep looking at what's happening, and draw conclusions if necessary. But I'm fairly sure that the amount of... things... we saw today was an exception. For now anyway. As I alluded to in my first sentence: Once Sci-Fi & Fantasy has the size of Stack Overflow, you'll remember the good old days and tell the younglings, "Oh, how I miss the quiet days of Answerama".

  • 1
    I hope it's going to abate, I didn't sign up for SO traffic. In a few hours all the mods will be in bed, hopefully so will the Futurama fans. – user56 Jun 28 '12 at 21:47
  • I know you didn't, and I'm not entirely serious about the SO comparison. You can be sure that we SE people are going to continue being there and helping out, and if necessary take measures. One possible thing would be to activate the mandatory "how to ask" page before asking a question. – balpha Jun 28 '12 at 21:59
  • @balpha - Good idea, that. <captain_picard>Make it so</pretentious_shwakspearean_acting> – DVK-on-Ahch-To Jun 28 '12 at 22:00
  • ... first person commenting that my XML wasn't valid gets hit with a Perl regular expression to parse XML. – DVK-on-Ahch-To Jun 28 '12 at 22:01
  • @balpha You mean it's not? Why????? Please do! And also how to answer. (My perception is biased by flags, but from what I've seen, we have more of an answer quality problem.) – user56 Jun 28 '12 at 22:01
  • Okay, we'll enable how-to-answer. – balpha Jun 28 '12 at 22:15