Have we done something wrong, that we get such totally travel-unrelated question?

Question

Another question randomly posted on Travel.SE: Asked to send emergency travel money by MoneyGram, is this a scam?

Or maybe not so randomly? Correct me if I'm wrong, but recently a lot of travel-unrelated questions land here, or at least I haven't noticed such off-topic flow anywhere except maybe Stack Overflow, where, however, they are a little nuisance compared to the flow of the bad questions.

This question isn't bad per se. It's just totally travel unrelated. It would match perfectly Money and Finance, that love identify-this-scam type of questions. Or on Workplace. If the OP have read site descriptions, he'd post there. If he'd just pick the most popular one, it would land on Stack Overflow. If he'd pick up a random one, that why Travel, and not Gardening or Parenting?

Is there something in the site description, that screams 'If you have no idea where to post, post here'?

Answer 1

That question seems at least vaguely travel-related, since it starts off talking about visas and tickets and says "emergency travel money," so it doesn't seem unsurprising someone might end up here to ask it. I agree it's not entirely a travel question and that the travel-related references are kind of unnecessary to the actual point, but since the OP made the choice to write the question in a way that repeatedly references travel, I can see how they ended up here.

My sense though is that we've always had questions like that here, but they used to stand out less because we previously got a lot more actual travel questions. In 2019, we were getting on the order of 180-200 questions/week during the summer peak, and now it's a few dozen. That is, of course, inevitable during a global pandemic that has severely curtailed and restricted travel.

But I suspect that people who have strange situations, sometimes fairly unrelated to travel, are continuing to find us at the same rate as before, even as we get fewer run-of-the-mill travel questions, so the more unrelated questions stand out more.

Answer 2

Zach Lipton mentioned that your impression "we get such totally travel-unrelated question" is mostly by caused by a reduction of good questions. I concur and I'd underline that this reduction, aside from covid itself, is also likely due to 1) frequent closure of valid questions 2) the many negative "don't travel" comments that questions received during the beginning of covid. This doesn't help attract good questions.