Is promoting another Stack Exchange site OK?

Question

We often get questions, usually text-parsing ones, from people working in Bioinformatics. Since I am a bioinformatician and a pro tempore moderator on Bioinformatics SE, I will often leave a comment under such questions informing the OP that there is such a site as Bioinformatics Stack Exchange. For example, here:

It looks like you might also be interested in our sister site: Bioinformatics. – terdon♦ 8 mins ago

Or here:

Your question is on topic and welcome here, but you might be interested in our new Bioinformatics site. – terdon♦ Jun 23 '17 at 9:25

The last thing I want to do is deprive this site of useful questions, but the Bioinformatics site is indeed better suited for some of these issues since it can often be helpful to be familiar with the file formats involved.

So, how does the community feel about this? Is it OK for me to do this? Does anyone object? Should I, as a mod of Unix & Linux, not leave comments advertising another site? Or does nobody really care?

Answer 1

I see no issues with this.

I do this myself, especially if a user has asked bioinformatics-related questions in the past. This was a question about parsing and reformatting a Fastq file from a user with a number of bioinformatics-related questions on our site:

The question was definitely on-topic here but I wanted them to just be aware of the bioinfo site as they weren't associated with that yet. I noticed that they immediately created an account there afterwards.

That way the user has two venues for asking questions and can choose the one that they feel more closely fit their needs.

In addition to that, many over here might not know that there may exist tools for performing certain common bioinformatics tasks and will instead "cobble together" a script that may work for the specific data shown (only), but that does not properly handle "quirky real data" (biology is messy). The user leaves not knowing the limitations and are confused when trying to apply the same thing to another seemingly similar data set and fails.

So from the user's perspective, it's a good thing to be made aware of the Bioinformatics SE site.

It would also, obviously, benefit the bioinfo site to have more users, and by having more users on an SE site in general, further people (colleagues, friends etc.) are made aware of the resources available.

Also, some text-processing tasks that bioinformaticians want to perform on their data are sometimes somewhat dull. It's "get these lines if that value is positive". And then there's another similar question, but on another set of data, possibly in another well known format (in bioinfo circles), but with essentially the same formulation... The solution may be interesting in the ways it performs the task, but it would not in other ways benefit a non-bioinformatician Unix user.

I would not migrate bioinformatics questions to the bioinfo site unless they were explicitly about the specific use of bioinformatics software, or asked about bioinformatics methodology etc.

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I would similarly not see any issues with pointing out the existence of the Vi and Vim site, or any other SE site, to users that may benefit from having access other users with special interests/expertise (although I would honestly not think pointing out the Vi site in particular would need to happen that often).

Answer 2

Yes, but not in that way.

Here is how I do it, with sites like the vi one for example, for what it is worth.

• If the questioner is lost, and was apparently unsure where to come in the first place, then I point to the other Stack Exchange WWW site if it is a better fit.

• If there is a question, or better yet a full question and answer, on the other WWW site, I point to those specifically, not as a wave in the general direction of the other WWW site.

• On occasion, I will point to a tag on the other site, as a way of indicating that a whole load of questions and answers already exist on the other site.

I think that this is superior to a wishy-washy boilerplate "you might like" approach. We have that sort of thing down the right hand side of the page already, with the site advertisements, network questions, and the like.

Perhaps the best thing that you can do is write up good questions and answers on that site to be pointed to. Surely you can do better than How do I download a public dataset from the internet to linux? , for example. ☺ (As an aside: It's absurd how pointlessly difficult those people have made the task of archiving some directories into a ZIP file and then downloading it with HTTP.)

Further reading

• https://bioinformatics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144/
• https://unix.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5172

Answer 3

A few points:

• suggesting an SE network site to the user is common and acceptable: we see https://askubuntu.com, https://serverfault.com, https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com , etc Usually that comes up in case of off-topic questions, where the phrasing is "This question might be more suitable for [insert your favorite site here]"

• Promoting non-SE network site is typically considered spam, which is not the case with Bioinformatics site since it is within SE network

• Phrasing could be altered. "[Y]ou might also be interested in our sister site: Bioinformatics." Sister site may be unfamiliar concept to the user, who might not even be aware that there's whole network of related sites to Unix&Linux. Consider adding extra info: "[Y]ou might also be interested in our sister site: Bioinformatics, together with Unix&Linux Stackexchange it is part of StackExchange network."

• Promoting also could be done via answers: link a question from that site and specifically mention the name of the site. "For further reading on the topic, see this post on Bioinformatics SE: [some link here] "