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We all love Movies & TV Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.

The Site Self-Evaluation review queue is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter. Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.

Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? Post an answer below to share your thoughts and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!

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First off, I'm very happy that this site is now maintaining decent traffic numbers (8000 views/day) even during the winter when major releases are scarce.

We have also drastically improved our community moderation with users like @Kalina and @Christian Rau really stepping up to help moderate this site along with @Ankit Sharma.

I also would like to congratulate @Oliver_C and @Nobby for being our first users over 10k and keeping a strong lead in reputation.

Overall, I think the quality of the site itself just keeps getting better with each passing day as our Q's/day is on the rise, our user base keeps getting stronger and we keep getting more and more excellent questions.

That being said, I have this to say about the eval questions: they suck

A vast majority of the questions chosen for this eval were borderline acceptable ID questions which I already have a personal distaste towards, compounded with the fact that most of them aren't very well written and have no real chance to be improved without the author visiting the site again, it really saddens me that this eval will most likely come out as our weakest since our first eval well over a year ago.

I urge everyone reading this to scour meta and put your thoughts into how important these questions are to us now that we are growing at a nice steady pace.

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Instead of evaluating less successful questions in an attempt to determine how we can be more successful, wouldn't it make more sense to look at questions that have had over 5000 views to see what we can learn from them? Examples (this is but a few of many):

Why is the bride's name bleeped in Kill Bill Vol 1? 10000 views

Why is there no Robin in the Nolan-directed Batman movies? 22000 views

What is the meaning of the "fly scene" in Breaking Bad? 17000 views

Do Sheldon's equations reflect real math/physics research? 5000 views

Banner's control of Hulk in Avengers 32000 views

What did David say to the engineer in Prometheus? 35000 views

How did Sherlock survive the fall? 10000 views

What would be the equivalent of the carnivorous island? 33000 views

What happened to Bruce Wayne/Batman's knee? 27000 views

Why does Obi-Wan say that he'll become more powerful if Vader kills him? 10000 views

Explain the plane scene in The Dark Knight Rises?

Why does Jack Nicholson say "Here's Johnny!" in The Shining when his character is called Jack? 10000 views

Why did Captain America give Nick Fury a ten dollar bill? 19000 views

Why is Gandalf referred to as Mithrandir? 23000 views

  1. I think in most cases it is the timeliness of the question that has driven viewership - the movie or TV show just came out, lots of people have the same question, and someone asked it here so we are near the top of the result list when people search. We got in the game before the question was asked on too many other sites. For those of us (not me, I'm afraid) who go to movies when they first come out, it might be a goal to come out of a new movie with a burning question or two. Maybe they are your own questions and maybe they are questions you hear other people asking...
  2. In other cases it is timelessness that plays a part - they are questions about popular, iconic characters like Jack and Sheldon - the topic is popular and there are not a lot of websites addressing the question since timeliness is not a factor, so again we rise to the top of a search list.
  3. Also I think in most of these successful questions, the words people would choose to search on are in the title of the question. Maybe we should really be looking at editing titles to include appropriate search words.

The value of these questions beyond the information they provide is that they draw a lot of people to the site. This is only a partial list of high-view questions. A more exhaustive list might provide other insights.

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  • That's why these days, i largely try to ask question for the TV Show which are on air and our question bank is week for them. Like Teen wolf which is pretty famous in Social network these days and people ask question about them regularly. But its not possible always.
    – Ankit Sharma Mod
    Jul 4, 2013 at 18:05
  • Old TOW was the good option in getting latest question but its god stopped due to inactivity in last days.
    – Ankit Sharma Mod
    Jul 4, 2013 at 18:06
  • The questions for the evaluation are, as far as i am aware, selected at random from relatively recent questions. The idea is to get an idea of the quality of the site as a whole, not just those that are popular.
    – DForck42
    Jul 10, 2013 at 13:33
  • @DForck42 Yes, I do understand that. I was kind of jumping past that (since these questions seem to indicate that our quality isn't great) to figuring out how we improve quality of the site in general. Perhaps my answer was better suited to a new post than as an answer here. To me, though, it's just evaluating from another angle.
    – MJ6
    Jul 10, 2013 at 13:45
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I think, perhaps, my biggest gripe was the inclusion of a couple of questions that were not fleshed out enough - just one sentence - and yes, theses were more often than not ID questions (although the Breaking Bad one was a decent question albeit rather brief).

Perhaps I'm looking for more meat on their bones, but will probably end up with waffle...

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    The way the eval works is they take a random sampling of relatively recent questions. We've had a spike in ID questions as of late, hence why there are more in the eval.
    – DForck42
    Jul 1, 2013 at 15:12
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