What is meta? ×
Meta Stack Exchange is where users like you discuss bugs, features, and support issues that affect the software powering all 127 Stack Exchange communities.

So it's crossed my mind recently in relation to a few of my questions that they would be quite appropriate on more than one Stack Exchange (Area 51) sites. My question is, is it considered acceptable/appropriate to post an identical question on, say, two different SE sites?

To give a concrete example, I recently asked the question entitled The Power of Lambda Calculi on math.stackexchange (Mathematics), but soon thereafter it would be almost as appropriate on cstheory.stackexchange.com (Theoretical Computer Science).

Any thoughts on this general issue (or even specific case)? Should users be permitted (or even encouraged) to cross-post in certain rare cases where the subject matter is germane to more than a single SE site?

Note: See the related FAQ entry here

share|improve this question

marked as duplicate by nhinkle, hims056, Lucifer, Emrakul, BoltClock's a Unicorn Jun 11 '13 at 7:20

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.

    
Also, How to convert PPT/PPTX files to PDF? (SU/WA) –  badp Sep 28 '10 at 15:28
add comment

3 Answers

up vote 21 down vote accepted

Cross posting is fine, provided:

  1. You respect the differences in the audiences at the different sites;
  2. You allow some time to pass between successive questions, and update them in the light of the answers previously received; and
  3. Really the first point again, you should have an idea what the new site offers in terms of expertise to crack your question that the previous site did not.

Usenet-style forum spamming is, I hardly need to say, bad.

share|improve this answer
    
Hi Charles. Thanks for the info. Funny that you've answered my question and now meta-question! Is that an official Stack Overflow line on cross-posting? Either way, it agrees exactly with the common-sense answer I had in mind. –  Noldorin Sep 28 '10 at 18:23
    
@Noldorin: I saw your question here first. Is that an official Stack Overflow line on cross-posting? - No, but it reflects widespread practice among SX betas and MO. –  Charles Stewart Sep 29 '10 at 13:33
    
Well, whatever gets your attention. :) And fair enough regarding the practice, sounds sensible to me. –  Noldorin Sep 29 '10 at 16:00
add comment

Idea:

If you have {x} rep (500?) on the source site and 5k rep on the destination site (rationale: you need to be truly sure the question belongs there; 2k rep beyond close voting access sounds reasonable for this), you can nominate a question for cross posting. This appears on the destination site as a moderation flag.

If approved, the question appears on the destination's site homepage. The question is shown with the source's favicon and clicking on it brings to the question page on the source site. Thus, only one copy of the question exists; only one site's policies apply; however, users of the destination site can effectively bring additional expertise to the table.

The question will need different tagging on each site it appears on; tagging is up to the user nominating the question for cross posting (rationale: if the question is off topic you'll have trouble tagging).

You could introduce voting for this, but for values of {x} sufficiently high it may be quite hard to find enough users in the intersection of users with enough rep on both sites.

share|improve this answer
3  
Interesting idea. It probably needs a bit of tweaking to work efficiently, but it sounds like a decent core idea. (Rather than cross-posting it might be nice to be able to move questions between SE sites or just generate pseudo-questions which link to the question on another SE site). If you fancy, post this as a feature request. I'd be happy to support the idea. –  Noldorin Sep 28 '10 at 18:27
add comment

I have no problem with a user posting the same question on multiple sites as long as that is clear. So, I'd say if you do it create links between the questions so that it is completely transparent.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/65931/cross-posting-on-stackexchange-sites?answertab=oldest
meta.stackexchange.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-23
76835
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:47N56PEMIKPA7L53NFHHNQBX2K3YDKOP
<urn:uuid:93ab1294-b22c-4264-b2b9-a1236e9e1adf>
2014-07-11T23:09:04Z
198.252.206.16
sha1:AR5JHBP6OWRSGU7NYPJNHWIHW4ZU7LIH
<urn:uuid:01976d20-34c0-4ea3-b070-e1653b9c8941>
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/65931/cross-posting-on-stackexchange-sites?answertab=oldest
response
<urn:uuid:6e9f565a-920d-4544-8f54-d4383775b8f5>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-212-248.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-23
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for July 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf