Promoting TeX, LaTeX and friends

Question

What can we do to promote our site? All ideas would be very welcome.

Andrew already suggested something in Go back to your constiuencies and prepare for public beta! Let's extend it and continue.

• Post news about the site in your blog. Post again, if new things happen, like finishing of beta, getting the domain name, reaching a number of 1000 users and so on. I've seen:

  • A new place for TeX questions and Places for questions (again) by Joseph Wright
  • TeX, LaTeX and Friends - a new Q&A site by Stefan Kottwitz
  • New (La)TeX Q&A Site

• Link to the site. If you own a web page, maintain a link list or a blog roll, you could add a link to our TeX site to show where you discuss and where you support LaTeX users.

• Mention the site in forums dealing with LaTeX. But be tactful, there shouldn't be the impression that we entice away their users. It might be that users additionally join our site, with no harm to the other forum. Many maths, physics, chemistry or operating systems discussion boards have subforums dealing with LaTeX. There it wouldn't be a competition with the main board. At last, why shouldn't TeX interested users know about a new site.

  • I posted a news message on the german LaTeX forum golatex.de. Not yet in other forums because of the thoughts written some lines above.

• Kindly invite LaTeX users on related sites like for example here on SO.

• Get other bloggers interested. Perhaps tell them the news in a comment on their blog.

• Inform about the site in journals. For instance in the PracTeX journal or in the journal of the german usergroup DANTE e.V.

• Submit our site to Web catalogues. I would have submitted it already to the Open Directory project, but keep waiting for the final domain name. There are further catalogues.

• Use social networks. Perhaps you're active on Facebook or Twitter or microblogging sites like identi.ca.

• Spread the news locally. For instance there are monthly meetings of TeX friends in many cities, perhaps you already visit one of them. Tell your friends in TeX user groups. The students at your university might be happy to hear about a place that helps them solving LaTeX problems with their writings.

• Link to our solutions. If you see a problem in an online discussion, it would help the questioner to find the solution here. Perhaps he would come back here helping other users or discussing more questions.

• Think about events on our site. Perhaps there could be a contest in article writing, in finding a solution for an existing problem, in raising the best idea on a certain suject, or making the best design for a TeX mousepad with reference sheet or a cup or the like. :-)

• Post interesting questions. That makes our site and its content more attractive.

• More ideas?

Answer 1

I think Stefan's suggestion:

Link to our solutions. If you see a problem in an online discussion, it would help the questioner to find the solution here. Perhaps he would come back here helping other users or discussing more questions

is the best. Nobody on another forum will be unhappy to be directed to a place where their question is already answered, and they will hopefully be impressed by our high-quality answers and stick around.

Answer 2

I wondered about a poster that could go up in people's departments.

Given the success of MathOverflow, I think that we should think carefully about how to promote this site to academics, particularly ones that would hesitate at joining some mailing list or forum about TeX.

I'm not saying that we should try to be an academic-only site, just that I think that there are certain aspects of the SE system that might work well for them and as lots use TeX this site could be very useful to them.

Answer 3

Here is a post I wrote to the pgf-users mailing list:

Subject: Invitation to join tex.stackexchange.com

Dear pgf-users,

Congratulations to the developers on a new release of PGF.

I hope developers and all users will consider joining the growing community at the "TeX, LaTeX, and Friends" site on StackExchange:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/

StackExchange is specialized StackOverflow, which is a social website for programmers. StackExchange sites offer moderated (like digg), tagged (like delicious) questions and answers (like traditional mailing lists and forums). Plus avatars and badges for additional fun. For me, StackExchange works really well for answering what I can and learning from the experts when I can't.

Signing up is easy--you can link to your Facebook, Google, or OpenID account so no need to remember another username and password. The TeX SE site is in public beta now and could benefit from more users, more questions, and more answers.

Here's a good question about PGF 2.10 if you're interested.

What is new in pgf 2.10

Hope to see you there.

The only trouble is that because of spamming it takes human intervention to get subscribed to the list, and I'm currently unsubscribed. :-( Once I get back on I'll send it. In the meantime, feel free to edit and adapt my elevator pitch and send it out.

Answer 4

We will probably have some discussion about support sites at the UK-TUG AGM, which is likely to be on the 16th of October. Our current chair is Jonathan Fine, who has been very keen on getting this type of site going. I guess either he or I will talk about it.

(Shameless self promotion: the AGM is open to all, so feel free to come along if you are in the UK even if you're not currently a member.)

Answer 5

I would like to elaborate on the following point Stefan made:

• Kindly invite LaTeX users on related sites like for example here on SO.

There are now many Stack Exchange sites (81 at the moment!) and on some there can come up LaTeX questions that really belongs here. There are a few ways for us to make people on other SX sites to make them aware of TeX.SX:

• Questions on other sites that belongs here can be flagged for migration by choosing "it needs ♦ moderator attention, other" and writing something like "Belongs on tex.stackexchange.com". To find such question one can view new question in relevant tags such as newest questions in the LaTeX tag on Stack Overflow.
• Tag wikis on other sites can be edited to inform of this site. See e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/tags/tex/info, https://stackoverflow.com/tags/latex/info, https://superuser.com/tags/latex/info, https://askubuntu.com/tags/latex/info, https://unix.stackexchange.com/tags/latex/info.
• Monitor Meta Stack Overflow for posts such as "Where do I ask X?" and inform of TeX.SX if its relevant. Checking Meta Stack Overflow is also relevant for following posts such as Can SO questions on TeX be migrated to tex.SX? and Can we have a ruling on LaTeX on Stack Overflow?.