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Apple.SE needs promotion to increase both the amount of users and questions on Apple.SE. (Mind you we still have 68 days to prove our worth)

I'm noticing the following things really need help:

  • Answer or encourage answers to be accepted with the unanswered questions. We presently have the third lowest answered percentage of all the new SE sites according to StackExchange's Main Site. We're only ahead of Electronic Gadgets (which will most likely be going away) and WordPress.
  • Don't be afraid to vote on questions and answers. At present with reduced values for the required rep to do actions we still only have 7 users (excluding mods) who can vote to close questions and only 1 (excluding mods) who can edit questions.
  • Encourage people to visit and even better participate using whichever method you'd like. There are quick links to share questions on Twitter and Facebook on every question and recently 3 new badges have been added to reward those who share questions.

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I think the new permalinks and badges are a genius way of growing site traffic. My advice is to attempt to locate questions people are asking on other sites that have answers here and post a link to the answer here. This provides a non-spammy way of increasing the visibility of the site, increases the Google pagerank for our content, and provides the person on the other site with the answer to their question.

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    The "non-spammy approach" for advertising at other sites is a great idea actually
    – Jonik
    Commented Sep 16, 2010 at 19:29
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One problem, in a way, in getting more people here, is that there already are popular Apple related sites and forums which have strong communities around them and (sometimes) are (tolerably) useful for finding information. Examples:

Both are powered by traditional forum software which totally sucks in surfacing useful information but is good for creating communities.

For Q&A, the Stack Exchange platform is clearly superior. But currently the largest, most knowledgeable communities are still elsewhere. (That's why I had to wade through all those pages about iPhone 4 ordering on Hopeinen Omena; I wouldn't have got that information from here.)

So, we need to make users of those sites understand there's something better out there for Q&A. I'm not saying I know how to do that, but this is something we should consider. :-) Guerrilla marketing at such forums? (Edit: Kyle's non-spammy approach of posting relevant links is even better!) Buying banner ads at Mac Rumors (if they allow it)? Other ideas?

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  • I think it's a great idea, we can find some unanswered question there and link them to asked same Question in Apple.SE or something like this.
    – Am1rr3zA
    Commented Sep 17, 2010 at 13:35
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I think we must encourage Superuser people who asks any question about apple to ask their quiestions in APPLE.SE.
we can do this by put comment on their question "this question more related to APPLE.SE"

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    Until Apple is out of beta this isn't encouraged from what I understand as they're perfectly legitimate for Super User.
    – Chealion Mod
    Commented Sep 13, 2010 at 21:16
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    Also, we need to get users from outside the Stack Overflow / SE universe, not just those who are "already converted": meta.apple.stackexchange.com/questions/89/promoting-apple-se/…
    – Jonik
    Commented Sep 16, 2010 at 19:32
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Why not sponsored some Apple related tags on S[UFO] ?

Like [android] or [flex].

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According to StackOverflow blog we just have 60 days left to graduates to full citizenship. and we must reach some point to fulfil that.

  1. number of new questions per day
  2. number of people who vote
  3. number of registered users
  4. percentage of answered questions

I suggest for solving number 1 and 2 that top user act more activity, I see top 35 user profile and see just 7 of them vote more than 70 time and just 1 person get "Civic Duty " badges.
and about 7 or more person asked 5 or above questions, we need more question per day.

and for attracting more new user I think "poll-style-questions" will help us. they have more view than other questions.

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  • Really disagree with the poll-style questions bit. With luck the Gadgets.SE questions will help draw more users here.
    – Chealion Mod
    Commented Sep 16, 2010 at 16:23
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    Joel Spolsky, though, seems to be totally for using (good) poll questions to promote SE sites. Consider this tweet (which has already brought thousands of visitors here): twitter.com/spolsky/status/24493360648
    – Jonik
    Commented Sep 16, 2010 at 19:06
  • @Jonik: Should clarify; I disagree with making new poll questions. Obviously my opinion is clear - I don't like them but they do work but they really need to be kept clean like the ones we have are. I closed some from gadgets as they were examples of badly done poll questions.
    – Chealion Mod
    Commented Sep 16, 2010 at 20:06
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    @Chealion: I totally agree that we can be picky about any new polls, but I think (as you might guess by now :) that a strict "no new polls" policy is harmful. (Some interesting stuff will probably happen in the future too (e.g. completely new Apple products) and such rule would restrict too much.)
    – Jonik
    Commented Sep 19, 2010 at 13:01
  • @Jonik I think that's what will happen. :-)
    – Chealion Mod
    Commented Sep 19, 2010 at 21:51

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