Should we do something about the high number of Jenkins questions with no votes and no answers?

Question

I follow the jenkins tag on all SE sites. I've noticed that SU attracts an oddly large amount of Jenkins questions that receive basically no attention. These questions have some problems:

• These questions are not on topic according to the help center. Specifically, Jenkins questions typically violate the rules that disallow questions about "programming and software development" (Jenkins is primarily a software development tool) and "issues specific to corporate IT support and networks" (Jenkins is typically used in a corporate CI/CD environment).
• These questions have low rates of upvotes. There are 320 questions with the Jenkins tag on SU, of which only about 100 have received any upvotes.
• These questions have low answer rates. Only about 1/3rd of Jenkins questions on SU have at least one upvoted or accepted answer, and I believe fewer than half have any answers at all.
• Most of the questions in the Jenkins tag seem to be asked by brand new SU users. That's a bit of a guess on my end as I don't have access to such metrics; this is just my experience based on following the Jenkins tag.

In summary, my experience with the Jenkins tag on SU is well-described by the following screenshot:

In my personal opinion, as someone who has answered Jenkins questions on many different SE network sites, this is a problem because it means many people asking for Jenkins help on SU aren't receiving any help at all.

Also in my opinion, Jenkins questions in general are more appropriate for either Stack Overflow (there are 37,000 questions in the Jenkins tag there, the majority of which have at least one upvoted or accepted answer) or DevOps (422 questions in the Jenkins tag, of which over 2/3rds have at least one upvoted or accepted answer). Technically, Jenkins questions are also on-topic for Unix & Linux, but in my experience, there are very few Jenkins experts on that site, so Jenkins questions there tend to receive little attention. Sometimes there are also Jenkins questions on Server Fault, but IMO that site has a similar problem to SU with regards to the Jenkins tag.

So what should we do about these questions? Some thoughts:

• Flag each question for migration as it comes up. This is very tedious and cumbersome considering the considerable number of Jenkins questions already on the site, and it's not a particularly scalable or sustainable solution if more Jenkins questions keep rolling in.
• Have a moderator mass-migrate questions. Not sure if this is desirable as it might mean the occasional Jenkins question that is appropriate for SU (IMO these are rather rare) would get moved. Also this wouldn't address new questions in the future.
• Blacklist the Jenkins tag. Not sure if this is technically possible (I'm not terribly active on the SE network so I don't know all the tools available to moderators).
• Do nothing. Accept that the status quo is fine.

Answer 1

These questions are not on-topic according to the help center. Specifically, Jenkins questions typically violate the rules that disallow questions about "programming and software development" (Jenkins is primarily a software development tool) and "issues specific to corporate IT support and networks" (Jenkins is typically used in a corporate CI/CD environment).

If there is absolutely no way a question about Jenkins is within scope, then it should be migrated to the correct community or put on-hold, in other words, a question existing with no answers for years, isn't helpful to our community.

Also in my opinion, Jenkins questions in general are more appropriate for either Stack Overflow (there are 37,000 questions in the Jenkins tag there, the majority of which have at least one upvoted or accepted answer) or DevOps (422 questions in the Jenkins tag, of which over 2/3rds have at least one upvoted or accepted answer).

Based on the description of the questions you provided I would have to agree. Sadly, only the more recent questions can be migrated, any question that is beyond the threshold cannot be migrated to the proper community.

Flag each question for migration as it comes up. This is very tedious and cumbersome considering the considerable number of Jenkins questions already on the site, and it's not a particularly scalable or sustainable solution if more Jenkins questions keep rolling in.

The fact there are only 320 questions with that tag indicates it's not a popular tag. I read about 320 questions about Windows daily.

Have a moderator mass-migrate questions. Not sure if this is desirable as it might mean the occasional Jenkins question that is appropriate for SU (IMO these are rather rare) would get moved. Also, this wouldn't address new questions in the future.

To my knowledge, the moderators do not have a method to migrate that many questions at once, each eligible question, would have to be migrated individually. We should not migrate a question that cannot be answered by the Stack Overflow community. Hopefully, after closing and/or deleting the questions that cannot be answered, we will only be left with proper migration candidates

Blacklist the Jenkins tag. Not sure if this is technically possible (I'm not terribly active on the SE network so I don't know all the tools available to moderators).

While this is indeed possible it would not solve the underline problem. If the community does indeed believe that questions about Jenkins do not belong on Super User, then the community must take it upon themselves to vote to migrate questions about Jenkins. This cannot be something left to the moderators to handle.