How can we promote Islam.SE

Question

This may sound like duplicate but please read.

I wanted to ask a question the other day about Mehr. I wanted a more authentic view so I searched online and went to some of the top sites in the search like IslamQA and some others. I found that many Islamic sites would not let you ask questions and the ones who did had some kind of error message that they reached their daily max, please visit tomorrow.

Not sure if the above messages were entirely accurate but there is message here. There really aren't many Islamic sites out there where you can ask questions. While they may have a few site with limited scholars, these scholars might well be overwhelmed by the number of questions they get.

I think we have a real opportunity to promote this site further. May be we can share one of our favorite question on facebook/twitter etc. Blog about it and let people know this site is there. More importantly we can invite users/Aalims through our local mosques who can really help flourish the site. Do you have any ideas, what do you guys think?

Answer 1

Right now, I don't think our biggest problem is traffic. According to Area51, we're getting over eight thousand hits a day (for comparison, C.SE was averaging less than four thousand hits a day when it graduated). We're already getting plenty of people visiting the site.

The problem as I see it is that we have yet to achieve much of a reputation for providing useful answers.

Even two years into things, I'm still seeing answers and comments peppered around along the lines of "You should ask a real scholar instead of asking here." This, I believe, is the core of our problem; the Islamic Q&A sites mentioned in OP are especially popular because answers are known to come from actual scholars. Regardless of what one may personally think of Shaykh Saalih al-Munajjid or his methodology, it's pretty easy to accept that he's way more knowledgeable in Islamic fiqh than any average schmoe on the street.

Answers here, on the other hand, can come from anyone regardless of expertise.

New users are never going to (or at least, shouldn't ever) trust us the same way as they trust a scholar-run Q&A site, and that's fine because that's not what we're trying to be. What we need to convince them to trust is the community, not so much that we can consistently provide useful answers (which is definitely important) but that we can make those useful answers stand out from the chaff that consistently clogs the forums already prevalent elsewhere on the Internet.

Even if you were to invite local Aalims to participate (and don't get me wrong, I'd love to have more local Aalims participating) their contributions are only ever going to be as useful as the community's ability to promote them. Proper voting and curating is, as always, the first line of defense, and this line is where the site has always been lacking.