6

Based on this question about resources/communities for travelling to remote islands - Should we really be recommending other travel sites?

The most upvoted answer links to two of the largest travel forums in the world - the only reason anyone there could answer better than here is through sheer weight of numbers.

My understanding is that our little beta travel stack will eventually attract travel "experts" who can answer such specific questions. Is there any circumstance in which a question would be off-topic as it is too specific?

1
  • 1
    I answered that question so I'll step with why I linked to WikiTravel. I know there is a lot of information out there already regarding the Perhentian Islands, and I'm sure the OP can Google it up. So I gave a gist of what and where the place is and why I felt he should go there, and gave WikiTravel as a starting point for someone to investigate further.
    – Ankur Banerjee
    Commented Jun 24, 2011 at 18:48

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
11

I suggest that during the beta, we avoid (and close) any questions of the form "which website..." or "where on the Internet can I find an answer to..."

Having one or two questions like this appear when the site is busy and bustling is fine. But when the site it small, we'd much rather have high-quality original content rather than just chitchat about where ELSE to go on the Internet to get the answer.

In other words, if you typed this into Google:

HOW DO I X?

And you got to a web page that said

THE ANSWER IS HERE ((some URL))

well, that page is just a waste of time, a trap on the Internet. So let's not build them.

4

Resource questions and web resource questions especially on SE several of the SE's I'm active on often become controversial.

I think it's better to ask what you're looking for and the answer may include a specific company or website, but asking about websites specifically should be discouraged. Having said that though, what about questions about "cheapest flight" aggregator sites? I've noticed that many of them didn't include Korean Air when I was booking this trip and they turned out to be the cheapest so a Q&A site that told me which such sites were good and which were not would be a good question here IMHO.

2

Well, our site is the Q & A site, and the point of the question was the communities in the internet. Many people thinks (8 against 1) what this is on-topic question and so do I.

Also, our site is not a forum and not a community - we do not communicate to each other except the moderation tools, flags and chat. People came here to get the answer and go away. And if we will provide great answers, the people will came again and again, just because of here they can get the good answer quickly.

For the current moment we can't provide answers better than people on that forums. So I think the answer is also off-topic. Maybe after some time such questions would not be accepted. We'll see.

0

I would be happy to be pointed to a better site for answering certain questions, like this one I asked, for which apparently Travel.SE is not good.

1
  • I often advise people via a comment in a question deemed subjective to try Quora. I know Joel himself uses it or did in the past. I don't think they're competing directly with SE and even if they are I believe competition is a good thing. I'm glad your question worked well on Quora. Use both sites for what each is good at.
    – hippietrail
    Commented Feb 26, 2014 at 10:15

You must log in to answer this question.

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