Site renaming, and next steps for defining target audience and scope

Question

In this discussion surrounding whether the site should be renamed to Polkadot, y'all appear to have reached a consensus: that the site URL be kept, but the name changed to Substrate and Polkadot.

With that in mind, here's what we're doing today in tandem with the flip to public beta:

• Renaming the site: the site will be renamed to Substrate and Polkadot;
• Updating the name in the topbar: the site "logo" displayed at the top of every page will be updated to reflect the name change;
• Creating a URL alias: we will create a secondary alias, so that https://polkadot.stackexchange.com redirects to https://substrate.stackexchange.com.

Despite the name change, we are not changing the site's favicon (the little icon that appears in your browser's tab) — it is currently Sub, and will be kept as such. We thought of changing it to S&P, but ultimately decided against it since it could be confused for the credit rating agency.

The consensus reached in the discussion is that the site's target audience and scope should be tweaked, to accommodate for the name change. However, we won't be making that change today — first, because both the tour page and the on-topic help center pages are mod-editable, and we reckon that's a good first task for your newly-elected moderators to undertake once the election is wrapped up. Second, because we believe there's still a bit of discussion to be had around the specific wording there — hence this post!

We noticed one distinctive aspect between this site's target audience (both the current one, and the proposed ones) and those of all other crypto/blockchain sites' in the Stack Exchange network (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8): yours is the only one focused solely on developers of the technology, and not on its users too. While this is not a problem, you could be pigeonholing yourselves with that choice, so it's best to make sure it is a deliberate one.

Additionally, while the previous discussion post does have one answer with a proposal for new wording for both the tour page and the on-topic help center page, we reckon it's best to host a discussion surrounding that in a separate post — this post — since the previous one's focus was the potential site name.

So leave suggestions for wording below, in separate answers. And don't forget to up- or down-vote other answers too!

Answer 1

Creating a URL alias: we will create a secondary alias, so that https://polkadot.stackexchange.com redirects to https://substrate.stackexchange.com.

This is AMAZING. Thank you!

Despite the name change, we are not changing the site's favicon.

This seems completely fine from our side. In the future, may we as a community update this logo to something like the official Substrate / Polkadot logo?

Yours is the only one focused solely on developers of the technology, and not on its users too.

I would appreciate advice on this topic.

For example, is it normal for the target audience of a site to change?

There are two distinct reasons why our current primary audience is targeted towards more towards developers:

1. Blockchains are relatively technical products, and even the more casual users tend to be on the "developer" spectrum.
2. Substrate and Polkadot are still quite early in their life. Today the ratio of active developers to active users is much different than it will be in the future.

I think we should absolutely keep this StackExchange as a home for non-developer users of Substrate / Polkadot, however, I don't think this will be the source of traffic in the early days of this site.

What I am concerned with much more than "developers" vs "users" is the general quality of questions. Maybe I have an unfair bias, but I worry that by providing a much more loose focus, we are going to get questions like:

• When will Polkadot price increase?
• How do sell a Substrate token on an exchange?
• What is the best project to invest in?
• etc...

And while these may be valid questions to some users, I don't think these kinds of questions will foster a healthy community in the short term. Maybe when there are thousands of more people answering questions, we could support things like this, but as someone who wants to contribute to this site, I would not like to read through many "bad" questions to find the good ones.

proposal for new wording for both the tour page and the on-topic help center page

I think we are mostly all very new to this.

Is there some kind of checklist we can use to help update these pages?

What level of customization is expected / useful?