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The Area 51 format is a little confusing to me, coming from the normal SE sites. I hope I'm even asking this in the right place. It seems there isn't a meta.area51, just a tag.

Why aren't there tags for each proposal? That would make it much easier to see what questions are what, especially on the main questions page (and it would also reduce some of the confusion I had when starting a discussion regarding how to actually link it to a proposal, which I'm still not even sure if I did correctly).

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That might make sense if this discussion section were designed to be your main destination to follow proposals — but discuss.Area51 wasn't meant to be used like a normal SE site. This is just an unrelated collection of all the posts that happen to be going through the individual proposals. The actual use case for Area 51 was supposed to be that you follow individual proposals you are intersted in helping create, and you would see the related discussions there.

There was never really supposed to be an "Area 51 community" per se who are supposed to be experts at creating all the sites that pass through here. It was only later that the discussion section was used to host the more generalized discussion about the Area 51 process itself (now labeled with the [meta-area51] tag).

So, long story short, the discussion section here was not really set up for someone to hover over and watch every discussion that passes through here. It's your personal interest in specific proposals that would lead you to any discussion related to that subject. Area 51 is not a "subject of expertise" and this is not set up like a generalized Q&A site. That's the basics of it.

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    I guess the organization of the site is really confusing to me. Usually it looks like what you describe, but sometimes you can somehow end up in a segment of the site that looks more like a traditional SE Q&A site.
    – asmeurer
    Jun 6, 2014 at 15:03
  • I understand the goal is to access a discussion through its proposal, but there are helpful discussions about proposals we're not even aware of until we find them on the discussion home page. For me, tagging each proposal-related question with its name would be more likely to encourage Area 51 participation than just tagging the general category. Alternatively, requiring people to name their proposal in their question could produce the same result, perhaps by adding it to the instructions in the "title" field used when asking a question.
    – Sue Saddest Farewell TGO GL
    Mar 11, 2015 at 19:36
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    @Sue When you ask a question from any proposal page, the system inserts a link to that proposal automatically. If you do not edit that link out, the discussion will automatically appear whenever you look at that proposal.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Mar 11, 2015 at 19:41
  • I noticed that, thanks. I thought the question here (at least my interpretation of it) was that if we're looking at the discussion questions home page, rather than asking from a proposal page, knowing what proposal each question relates to can help decide if I want to read the question. I'd appreciate that feature because there have been times when I've randomly opened questions and stumbled on interesting proposals I didn't know existed. Is this a better way to express my request?
    – Sue Saddest Farewell TGO GL
    Mar 11, 2015 at 20:03
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    @Sue Perhaps. Instead of using "tags", I can see the merit of labeling/displaying each question with the proposal name it belongs to (which may be what the original author intended in the first place). Interesting UI improvement to improve clarity; I'm just not sure if the devs are going to put the resources into improving that UI to encourage a use case we never intended, per my writeup above.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Mar 11, 2015 at 20:29
  • Thanks for this, and for understanding my point. Of course it wouldn't make sense to ask for something contrary to an intended purpose. You guys are busy enough as it is. I'm so blessed by SE and appreciate you taking the time to respond to our concerns.
    – Sue Saddest Farewell TGO GL
    Mar 12, 2015 at 18:56

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