You may or may not have noticed but the Cardano StackExchange site has recently been flooded with question that do not meet the site guidelines. This is unfortunate because this recent flood has brought a significant amount of new users.
How should we go about helping these new users learn better StackExchange practices without discouraging them from continuing to use the site?
The first few weeks and months of a site being around are when you all do the work of finding out what works for you.
We have general guidelines for what is in and out of scope on Stack Exchange and, for the most part, it's best for sites to keep in alignment with that - but if you find something that works well for you here, it's possible to keep it.
Where I'd be really cautious right now is the influx of forum-style questions that should be asked on a Cardano forum - things like:
These sorts of questions are more like news reports and future guessing - maybe there's official documentation of what's happening when but in a year when these things are done, these questions are useless - they're not generally considered a good fit for the Stack Exchange platform. Just as questions about when the next season of [TV show] is going to be released is out of scope on Movies & TV and Anime, when the next feature or release of a product should be out of scope here.
In the near term, you have some options - comment and vote to close or flag to close (if you have under 500 reputation) so that these questions get closed and prevent others from answering them. The CMs can also drop some guidance on the Cardano On Topic page - y'all just need to formulate it for us.
The thing to keep in mind through all of this is - there's no rush! You're in public beta. If a question sticks around and gets answered - that's fine. It's part of the learning process and it's completely normal! You need these sorts of questions to help make evidence-based decisions on your scope, so don't necessarily jump to conclusions of whether something should be in scope or not right away, though do feel free to base some discussion on how other sites have handled things.
Your meta should be as busy with scope discussions right now as your main site is with new questions - if you're curious about when something is in scope or not - ask here and work through it together, as a community. Make decisions and then implement them - either as community-specific close reasons (which the CMs can also help with until y'all get moderators) or on help center pages, or even just in comments.
Oh, and as a note - use the custom close reason you have - the field where you can enter whatever reason you want - it's often going to be more helpful to the person asking the question to have a more specific close reason rather than just "opinion based".
Enjoy the activity and help the new visitors get to know the site and adapt rather than pushing them away. Don't be afraid to ask us for help if you need it.
