Will ELL be attractive to those who don't already use Stack Exchange?

Question

ELL is attractive to me, because I'm used to how Stack Exchange sites work, and I'm by and large happy with how they work. And joining ELL is much easier than joining a non Stack Exchange forum and learning its norms.

But will ELL be attractive to people who don't already use Stack Exchange sites? There are plenty of other forums about English. For now, the main selling points I'd have for ELL are its Stack Exchange technology (voting, tagging, closing as duplicates). In the future, we may be able to show that our questions and answers are better than those in other forums, but we can't do that yet.

Answer 1

It depends on who finds it, and what they're looking for.

I ran into ELU through a Google search about a year ago, and kept coming back.

There seems to be a steady flow of new users – non-native speakers – who keep finding ELU and posting questions there. I think ELU should add something to their FAQ that reads:

If your question is largely rooted in the fact that English is not your primary language, and you want to learn more about it, then you might want to ask your question on the English Language Learners site instead.

I've seen a few recent questions on ELU that probably would have been better fits for this community, like:

• Is it X that Y?

• Pronunciation of "twenty" in US English

• "I am going to attend" vs "I am attending"

• In England, do people use “people” or “persons” more?

Note: I'm not saying these are great questions, or bad questions. I'm merely pointing out that they were asked by relatively new users, and probably would have been better fits for this community than for ELU.

Also, I noticed that, when voting to close as off-topic on ELU, this screen is presented:

I'm wondering what it will take to get a "belongs on ELL" option added to that.