Are "visa" questions taking over?

Question

I'm basically really sick of all the visa questions.

I thought his site was meant to be questions about roads, restaurants, and diseases in exciting foreign lands.

But there's a huge number of questions which are not really about travel - they are about

"International developing-world-to-first-world family immigration issues."

I think these questions are fascinating, I am happy to donate a substantial amount of money to starting a site for these questions, I care deeply for keeping families together, I am still bitter at Napoleon for inventing passports ... but more and more I just don't see these questions as having anything at all to do with travel.

This site is now known as the go to place to make a post if you need to find out whether your Uncle's bank account visa rejected student part time pregnant job can be disqualified at the border and I have TB.

These questions are only very nominally about "travel".

Some thoughts,

• Qualitatively it feels as if this site is done, "all" the questions are now just "visa rubbish". Does anyone know quantitatively if the percentage of such questions is increasing? Accelerating? It seems "even worse" lately.

• Could anything at all relating to student visas just be banned from the site altogether? It's just NOT "travel" related.

• Could anything at all relating to "Joining my {insert relative here}" just be banned from the site? These are only very nominally about "travel". They are questions by folks who are in the "commute-to-immigrate" lifestyle cycle as part of diaspoa immigration folkways. Again as a libertarian I want everyone all to get around every possible system and live anywhere they want, but it just, really, has nothing to do with this site.

• It's worth noting that "ACTUAL" "visa regarding travel" questions are unfortunately swamped by the sea of Uncle's bank account form rejected student part time pregnant job can be disqualified at the border and I have TB questions.

• Should there just be a drive to more aggressively push visa crap to the Expats site?

• Should there be YET ANOTHER site, "Visa Rights - discussing modern World Movement"

I come to the site cheery in the morning, wanting to see a discussion about whether you have to tip in New Zealand, if they really have Linner in Moscow or if you can swim in Sydney Harbour. But. Every single time it's just this sort of thing. It really just has zero to do with "travel", it's just more developing-world-to-first-world-family-immigration-issues, what-are-my-rights, what's-the-angle stuff.

(Indeed. Nobody is more in favor of and wanting info about that sort of thing, than me. I've sent a lifetime edging a huge string of passports and papers and baby moms in Sweden etc. But this is just Not the site for it - it's supposed to be about travel!)

SE sites are very delicate things, they can be easily killed off when a "takeover" of off-topic rubbish is allowed to take-over.

Answer 1

Stack Exchange is a website designed for resolving the "long tail" of questions - stuff that's generally too obscure to be explained in detail on official websites or where finding the answer is hard because you're not sure how to formulate the query. The idea is that the majority of users find StackExchange organically (through Google or referral links) rather than relying on direct hits. In this regard Travel.SE is quite successful, as around 90% of our visitors come from search engines. In addition, our traffic has grown every year since 2011 which shows that people are asking and answering the right questions. That's to address your concerns of Travel.SE getting "killed off" by visa questions.

Visa questions in particular are a large strength of this site as we have quite a lot of subject matter experts on this site, thanks to which we've built up a very wide collection of answers on visa problems. The answers on UK visas alone are a gold mine, thanks to the late @GayotFow. The more questions we successfully answer, the better a reputation this site gets, the more people we help. Nothing wrong with that, even if it's less exciting than helping people cross the Darien Gap on foot or navigate through the Arctic ocean in a private boat.

Finally, remember that Travel.SE could never have an oversupply of questions. We receive an average of 40 questions per day for three years now, despite the large growth of popularity in the meantime. If anything, we need more questions to help the site grow. And from what I've seen, the kind of folks who want to ask the "exciting" travel questions are not intimidated by the glute of visa questions. So let's not worry about the visa folks and welcome them to the site instead :)

Answer 2

Should there just be a drive to more aggressively push visa crap to the Expats site?

The first rule of migration is don't migrate crap.

The second rule of migration is to check that the question would be on-topic at the target site before migrating. Otherwise it will be closed as off-topic and bounced back, which is what's currently happening with the question you use as an example. Expats allows

• Questions about work, residence, student, investor and similar mid and long term visas aimed for staying in the country for more time than a tourist or short term business visa would allow

but not

• Questions about generic travel, tourism, and short term visits to a country, unless your current status as an expat would complicate or ease things

So feel free to migrate good student visa questions to expats, but not visit-my-relative questions.