@Mooseman, @michaelpri, @J.Musser, Do you, as the site moderators, have any suggestions, ideas, on how to raise traffic on Lifehacks? Or is it time to seriously reconsider the scope of Lifehacks, possibly broadening the scope?

@holroy We are getting a lot of visitors per day, but those are mostly people looking for something on Google. I do think that broadening the scope would definitely help bring in more questions, but I also think it would lower overall quality, which already isn't too high. I have suggested revisiting our early meta discussions. I think a better thing would be to make a clearer scope, rather than a broader one.

I agree that broadening will only make things 'worse' for everyone. If broadening means simply widening the boundaries on currently restricted areas.

Still thinking about ways to bring in more activity.

But how does clearing the scope help for all the people coming to get an "ordinary lifehack"?

I think broadening and clearing the scope, would be the way to go.

Using the definitions of "google" which @adamdport found: "A strategy or technique adopted in order to manage one's time and daily activities in a more efficient way." , and some requirement related to showing a proper effort on solving the issue at hand would be good.

@michaelpri Broadening and making it clearer, I think would both increase number of question and still gives us a proper way to handle low-quality question.

Broadening could open up for opinion based question, which one should try to avoid. But then again on [Code Review SE] we're allowing for slightly more opinionated answers, which seems to be work out recently well.

Any way, I do believe some actions needs to be taken soon before we loose all momentun and visitors as the site is not what they expect it to be...

@holroy Using that definition would probably make mind hacks on-topic, which I don't think is really a bad thing.

@michaelpri I do agree that mind hacks should still be off-topic (and most likely be sent onwards to something like Personal Productivity), but it shouldn't be too hard to limit to physical (personal?) life hacks

You might want to check out the top answer on this meta post ^

Promotional wheekly challenges has been tried, but it doesn't seem to be very effective. And the top-most voted answer does focus on too many questions being closed as "not a lifehack"

So as I read that top-voted answer, it does indicate to broaden the scope

@michaelpri I misread you... You want to allow mindhacks... And possibly some of them could be allowed, but that would require some clear wording I think.

My main point is simply that with the scope as written today, we shut down too much of the traffic, and are so-to-speak killing the site ourself. I do believe actions need to be taken before there is no traffic and no point in having a Lifehacks SE site. And I do believe Lifehacks has the right of life with a wider scope!

@holroy Well, that definition would probably encompass mind hacks unless we worded it more carefully. I do think some mind hacks would be good for this site, such as this one, but others, like this are not good fits. I think it could be hard to create a scope that allows some mind hacks, but not others

@michaelpri But do you agree that we should consider a new round of discussing the scope of Lifehacks? And do we do that?

@holroy Yes, we definitely need a new round of discussing.

I guess differentiating between mind hacks is part of the reason why I misread you, and think that a good start would be to open up for more conventional questions allowing not only "out of the box solutions"

@michaelpri Could you please initiate that round of discussing? I tried once, and it didn't get much attention...

@holroy I don't have much time now, but I'll try to write up a meta post later tonight.

@michaelpri Great!

Looking forward to seeing it!!!

We should possibly link to this chat room in an attempt to try generate some traffic/debate related to the topic? (Maybe dedicate it to scope discussion for some time?)