[metalmanac]

This is exactly the problem users are having. Since the purpose of the site and how it works is buried in the About page, people are clueless about what to do next. I am redoing the front page to only focus on explaining what the site is about.

The idea is this :

* provide a community reviewed wiki explaining what X is about and how to go about learning it. The aim is to answer the questions how to learn X programming language/framework/platform and what are the best resources to use.

* provide a Stackoverflow like QA section for users to ask and answer questions.

* provide a forum to submit and discuss learning resources (like HN)

* provide a chatroom to replicate the IRC experience

As you can see this I have completely failed to convey this. So that's what I am working on now : to convey the purpose of the site and improve the UX and UI. Reason for completely failing at this : I focus too much on the tech, the backend, unnecessary optimizations and time wasters like load testing.

[_fizz_buzz_]

It's a decent idea. I think a problem will be that you are trying to compete too much with stackoverflow.

* "provide a community reviewed wiki explaining what X is about": http://stackoverflow.com/tags/javascript/info

* "provide a Stackoverflow like QA section": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/javascript

* "provide an chatroom to replicate the IRC experience": http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/17/javascript

[metalmanac]

My hypothesis is that 99% of the people who use Stackoverflow only visit the QA part of it and things like the community wiki and chatroom receive minimal traffic. From talking to a few dozens of users, most people don't even know that the chat room and wiki exist!

The current number of users in the Stackoverflow chat rooms

> with 100 users currently talking in 57 rooms.

The usage of the chat is shockingly low.

I think there's room to provide a better learning experience for developers and providing chat rooms for developers is a low hanging fruit IMO. People here on HN know about IRC and how to use it, but we represent a very small fraction of the population interested in programming, so the idea is to tend to the general population eventually.

[stuaxo]

This is the first I've heard of a wiki or chatroom on S/O and I probably won't visit them now I know they exist either.

[CM30]

That's definitely part of the issue. When I viewed your site, I didn't have a clue what it did, or whether those were the only categories (they seem to be) or what features were even available here.

But I think your bigger issue is that your site feels completely dead. I mean, it's not hard to find the QA section or chat when you view a topic, but the lack of activity here means there's no real incentive to contribute. I mean, why ask a question if no one else is asking or answering any questions?

So my advice would be to focus on getting the site active to begin with. Maybe do like Reddit and make a bunch of fake users to ask questions about Django and Javascript and whatever else, then answer them with either your main account or one of the other fake ones. That way, when people view the Q/A pages or chats, they'll think there's an actual community there willing to help them out, and actually post a few questions.

[type0]

It sound like you are trying to compete with codementor.io the problem is that Metal Manac doesn't say anything meaningful and it looks kinda boring with just the bootstrap and no theme. You need to work on the integration between the features and UX, make it memorable! There was a HN tread recently that even bad web design can bring you more visitors/users as long as it's memorable and stands out from the croud.

[metalmanac]

I agree with you. The site is still very, very early and I am currently focusing on the UI and UX to make the site memorable. Thanks for the honest feedback!