Bad links in Footer

Question

As of right now, when I look at the footer on the Travel site, at the list of sites mentioned under the Stack Exchange Network heading (Technology, Life/Arts, Culture/Recreation, Science, Other) I am seeing all of theses pointing to https://travel.stackexchange.com/# which does not seem correct.

For comparison I just went to the Sci-Fi site and looked at the equivalent there and saw that they all point to https://scifi.stackexchange.com/#

I suspect that something is amiss on a greater level than just this site.

And One More Thing

The above was when browsing at the "list of questions" level. I just noticed that when I look at a specific question the links morph in to the actual question I am browsing.

Answer 1

The headings are not incorrectly linked per se; they are not supposed to function primarily as links. Rather, they serve as clickable labels for hidden lists of Stack Exchange sites.

If you click on, say, Life/Arts in the footer, it should replace the whole footer with a list of the various Stacks under that heading, such as Photography or Academia, with a "see more" link pointing to a filtered view of the Stack Exchange All Sites screen.

The system therefore works as designed from a certain point of view.

That said, they do look like links rather than buttons or headers. You could improve the usability by making them more distinctive, or you could make them more accessible by using more semantic links, perhaps pointing to https://stackexchange.com/sites#lifearts-oldest and so forth instead of #. That way, if Javascript is disabled or unavailable, the link could still function. An ARIA attribute might also help.

As this footer is standard across all Stacks, however, it is probably a topic for MSE.