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The url for the Science Fiction And Fantasy Stack Exchange website starts with "scifi" (https://scifi.stackexchange.com/).

Isn't "sfaf" more inclusive?
Should "scifi.stackexchange.com" be changed to "sfaf.stackexchange.com"?

Edit: breaking stable links shouldn’t be a problem i think. Links can be redirected to the new url or is this THE reason for not making the change?

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    Google actively discriminates against redirection links. Also, some browsers won't accept them at all.
    – Valorum
    Nov 14, 2016 at 10:10
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    On meta, because reputation isn't really tied to privileges here, downvotes are often used differently from mainsite: they tend to indicate agreement or disagreement with a proposal rather than any sense of the post's quality or coherence.
    – BESW
    Nov 14, 2016 at 10:13

2 Answers 2

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This isn't something the Scifi Stack Exchange can do on its own. Heck, our elected moderators can't even edit most of the help content. This change would require an appeal to the overseers of the Stack Exchange network itself

And sorry, but our Benevolent Stack Exchange Overlords won't break years of stable links for the sake of adopting a less memorable abbreviation that clarifies a distinction the majority of visitors probably don't care about. The cost/benefit just doesn't pan out.

An example of other Stacks with even more egregiously inaccurate titles: gaming.se is for video and computer games; for card games you'd want to use boardgames.se and for tabletop roleplaying games you'd want rpg.se--but if you ask about computer RPGs on rpg.se, we'll direct you back to gaming.se. Somehow, this still works out. Each site is clearly labelled in its banner, tour, and help, just like scifi.se is, to make the site's actual scope clear. We get confused people occasionally, but not often and it's easily fixed with migration flags.

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    I've never understood this whole 'speculative fiction' thing. It always struck me as a slightly snobbish way of saying "Oh no, I don't read sci fi"
    – Valorum
    Nov 14, 2016 at 9:05
  • @Valorum I'm sure some folks use it that way, but I regard it as an acknowledgement that the genre lines are blurry and most folks lump 'em together anyway: it's not a rejection of scifi, but an embracing of scifi as part of a wider spectrum.
    – BESW
    Nov 14, 2016 at 9:06
  • I can see a slight justification when it comes to "alternate history" type books but I've never seen it used ('out in the wild') other than by genre deniers. 99.9% of what people call spec-fic is clearly either sci-fi or fantasy.
    – Valorum
    Nov 14, 2016 at 9:28
  • i don’t understand the part on breaking of stable links. Edited the question. Downvote is surprising!
    – xypha
    Nov 14, 2016 at 9:55
  • @Xypha - If you change the URL, any external links to the site will break. Many browsers will refuse a redirect. It'll also dramatically harm any SEO efforts.
    – Valorum
    Nov 14, 2016 at 10:00
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    @Valorum - Quite simply, it includes both science fiction and fantasy (as well as other odds and ends), and so makes for a nice umbrella title.
    – Adamant
    Nov 14, 2016 at 10:02
  • @adamant - it seems pretentious to me
    – Valorum
    Nov 14, 2016 at 10:03
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    Well, it’s a whole lot better than “Science fiction and fantasy and alternate history and future dystopias and…”, so I appreciate its brevity. It can even be abbreviated to SF for minimum character length.
    – Adamant
    Nov 14, 2016 at 10:05
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https://fantasy.stackexchange.com/ redirects to https://scifi.stackexchange.com/ already. Try it.

The fact that the site's most-used name refers only to its sci-fi half is something that's long bugged me as well, seeing as I only came here for the fantasy. The underlying reason is due to ancient history: this was originally created as a place for sci-fi only, but fantasy was proposed to be on-topic on the first day of private beta and officially added to the site name only a couple of weeks later. Presumably https://fantasy.stackexchange.com/ was added as an alternative URL around the same time.

I would tend to agree that http://sff.stackexchange.com/ would also be worth having as an alternative URL, but as BESW says, this isn't something that can be done by SFF users or mods. The only way to get it will be to start a here on meta and get enough support for the CMs to consider looking at it (and even then there's no guarantee they'd do it, with a site this old and well-established.)

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  • added tag to question
    – xypha
    Nov 14, 2016 at 9:51
  • @xypha I wonder if it might be worth making a new question, since this one has already got a bunch of downvotes: leave this one as a discussion of whether it should be changed and make a new feature-request to ask for an alternative URL. There's a big difference between changing the URL and adding a new alternative URL, since one breaks stable links and the other doesn't - thus one is much more worth downvoting than the other.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Nov 14, 2016 at 9:59
  • @xypha Actually, I just realised that this is already a feature-request.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Nov 14, 2016 at 11:47
  • Fixed scifi-> fantasy
    – Edlothiad
    Sep 29, 2017 at 12:22
  • @Edlothiad Goddamn Community bot.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Sep 29, 2017 at 12:24

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