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I've been curious to see whether our traffic increases during the COVID crisis (because everyone has less access to their colleagues/professors in person, so they turn to online sources) or decreases (because people are focused on things other than OR).

Turns out our traffic has been quite flat over the past few weeks, just as it has been for the past ~6 months.

Would now be a good or bad time for us to "promote" OR.SE? I'm thinking of the sorts of activities we did when the site was first getting started, e.g., tweets, emails to colleagues and listservs, etc.

It's been a while since we've done this, and there may be lots of people who don't know about the site but would be interested in it, especially now. On the other hand, everyone's inboxes are clogged, and every other message we get seems to be "in this time of crisis, use our site." I don't want OR.SE to be just another one of those.

What do you think?

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One thing we could easily do, is to add to this list, which advertises at least two mathematics sites that are still in Beta: https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/915/consider-supporting-proposals-of-other-se-science-sites. Just now I put up an ad there for my Materials Modeling Area51 proposal.

However it does not appear that we have an OR logo, and I cannot seem to figure out how to get the "standard" one from Area51. Once we have a logo, we can post over there.

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    $\begingroup$ Maybe we need an official song, too? $\endgroup$ – Mark L. Stone May 9 '20 at 12:34
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I do agree that this is a good time to promote the site. People are staying home because of COVID-19, so they might be on their computer more often (personally I've found it even harder than normal to get a hold of some people, because despite them being home perhaps they are more depressed or overworked with "online teaching" or taking care of babies that they wouldn't need to when using OR Stack Exchange on campus, but it does not hurt to advertise).

After about an hour of struggling, I figured out how to make the ad for the Physics Meta! here is what it looks like:

enter image description here

If someone can come up with a better logo, it would be great!

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    $\begingroup$ Here is an ad I put together a while ago: drive.google.com/open?id=1jyTiDqCwMY5uHE6J6lQRx2CLdw-hawJ5 You're welcome to use it if you want. However, the sites that are listed on the page you linked to are all in beta (I think). Our site is not. So maybe that's not the right list? $\endgroup$ – LarrySnyder610♦ Apr 6 '20 at 13:23
  • $\begingroup$ Nice design! Which software was used to create it? I should probably try something like that for Materials Modeling too. I can change the ad from the "default" one, to your one. However, why is it that you say OR is not in Beta? $\endgroup$ – Nike Dattani Apr 6 '20 at 17:50
  • $\begingroup$ I made the ad in LaTeX/TikZ, with a bit of PowerPoint too. Not the preferred method, I think. :) $\endgroup$ – LarrySnyder610♦ Apr 7 '20 at 20:49
  • $\begingroup$ OR is in beta. I meant to say that everything in that list is in Area 51, while OR is not. But of course I was wrong -- that list is not only Area 51 proposals. So disregard my comment. $\endgroup$ – LarrySnyder610♦ Apr 7 '20 at 20:49

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