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Back on Stack Overflow, lately I've been seeing more comments from users trying to steer questions to WPSE, even in cases where I tend to think these questions wouldn't really be successful here.

For example:

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Or this one https://stackoverflow.com/q/57772560

Or this one: https://stackoverflow.com/q/57772275

And more.

In these examples the comments are always coming from the same user, but these are only examples I have just found. Lately I've encountered a few of these comments from different users.

When I can and I'm sure of, I try to comment telling users that:

a) Not everything that's on-topic on WPSE is off-topic on SO (overlap)

b) Not everything that mentions Wordpress and it is automatically on-topic on WPSE and should be directed over here.

My problem is that despite being mostly aware that there is a huge overlap between these two sites, I'm not convinced I'm equipped to give good advice on all situations.

Are there examples of questions that would be definitely on-topic here on WPSE but are clearly off-topic back on SO? Or is it the case that all questions that could be on-topic here would be on-topic there as well? (Obviously, it can never be the other way around, since this site is clearly more specialized and has no use for questions about Ruby or Magento, for example).

Either the scope of WPSE is a subset of the scope of SO, and thus anything off-topic on SO is off-topic here as well; or there is considerable overlap, although there are questions that could be on-topic on WPSE but wouldn't be on-topic on SO.

I've encountered a few questions about this searching in meta.wpse:

But I couldn't find a definitive answer.

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  • A good dupe-closure is as good as a good answer. I'm just trying to make sure I'm not telling someone "stop sending that over to WPSE, it's trash!", if some of those questions would be actually useful over here.
    – user47133
    Commented Sep 3, 2019 at 19:25

1 Answer 1

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I think in those cases, just because WordPress was mentioned or is tangentially involved somehow doesn't mean it fits into this stacks scope. It should be enough to point that out to the person commenting in a follow up comment.

I've done this in the past, but stack overflow is such a huge site in comparison to the other stacks that it's difficult to find all the questions that should be migrated, nevermind comment a rebuttal to these.

It's an easy enough mistake to make, and people sometimes ask totally unrelated questions, on the premise that the site uses WordPress, therefore any technology that's related to their site is a WordPress question, such as how to round the corners on a div in CSS ( CSS question, would be better on SO ).

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  • Disregarding these examples: are there questions that could be on topic here but would be automatically off-topic on SO that you are aware of or you could imagine?
    – user47133
    Commented Sep 3, 2019 at 20:48
  • I'm not sure what the exact scope of SO is, just that it's much wider than most stacks, but specifically programming
    – Tom J Nowell Mod
    Commented Sep 4, 2019 at 13:48
  • Thanks Tom. I'll wait to see if someone with more experience with SO can provide additional insights. What I'm look for is to verify if one could say that the scope of WPSE is a "subset" of SO's (and thus, anything off-topic on SO would be automatically off-topic on WPSE), or if there is a considerable intersection of scopes (particularly from WPSE point of view), but the scope of WPSE is not wholly included on the scope of SO.
    – user47133
    Commented Sep 4, 2019 at 13:55
  • I want to make sure we are sending you the right questions over here, and not trash. :)
    – user47133
    Commented Sep 4, 2019 at 13:57

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