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My personal feeling is that the scifi.stackexchange.com name is off-putting to fans of fantasy and not scifi, and that if the site had been inclusive from the beginning (or fantasy) it would be something else.

If others agree that it should change, what to? It needs to be clear (e.g. Cooking is cooking.stackexchange.com not seasonedadvice.stackexchange.com) and short (at most 10 characters, ideally under 8).

Updated summary: there was never enough momentum to get this altered (in particular, merging with the Fantasy proposal didn't seem to have any noticeable effect), and IMO it's too late to change scifi.stackexchange.com now (although I suppose going of the beta is the real deadline).

However, a fantasy.stackexchange.com alias still seems appropriate. Other sites have these (e.g. linux/unix, german/deutsch), so they are presumably acceptable to the SE team (who have been oddly silent about this so far).

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  • Robert's explanation is in a comment on this question, BTW: meta.scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/300/…
    – Tony Meyer
    Feb 6, 2011 at 4:06
  • BTW I can't imagine they would go for something like xn--and-hr13bbu.stackexchange.com (đź‘˝and🏰.stackexchange.com) :)
    – Tony Meyer
    Feb 6, 2011 at 9:57
  • I would like to point out that unix.stackexchange.com is the site for unix and linux. (Says so in the banner).
    – apoorv020
    Feb 25, 2011 at 6:13
  • I don't much care what you call the domain, but I think the fantasy side of the site is doing fine given how many questions about Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings we have.
    – b_jonas
    Jun 4, 2014 at 10:00

7 Answers 7

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Can fantasy.stackexchange.com redirect to scifi.stackexchange.com?

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    This is in place now. Better late than never. :)
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Jun 4, 2013 at 4:55
10

sff.stackexchange.com or fsf.stackexchange.com

Pros:

  • Includes both sci-fi and fantasy.
  • F&SF / SF&F are both well-established monikers for the genre (e.g. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is generally called just F&SF or F&SF mag).
  • Short (at least the subdomain is - we're stuck with the lengthy "stackexchange.com").
  • It resembles other StackExchange names, like gis, diy, rpg, and dba.
  • It doesn't need capitalisation/hyphenation (e.g. sfandf, fandsf, sf-f, f-sf or scifiandfantasy) to be clearly read.

Cons:

  • It's not immediately clear what "sff" or "fsf" mean to anyone not expecting it to be a genre. (OTOH, most of the traffic comes from Google, where this isn't that important).
  • fsf is used to refer to the Free Software Foundation.

(Community wiki in case anyone wants to add pros/cons).

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    I believe that since this post, SFF has become a common method for the most common users to refer to this site...
    – PearsonArtPhoto
    Dec 9, 2011 at 5:26
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I think the main point is that the banner on the site should be clear, and “Science Fiction & Fantasy” is fine.

I don't even like scifi much, because there are people who use that term derogatorily. I like “speculative fiction” (abbreviated sf), but many people don't know this term. Just sf might be confusing because on Stack Exchange, “SF” is Server Fault.

There are precedents for having more than one alias (with one considered canonical), for example linux redirects to unix. Since we've merged with the fantasy proposal, a redirection from fantasy seems appropriate.

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I would like to see both in the URL. However, currently all Stack Exchange sites (that I've seen) have short, single words before ".stackexchange.com" (e.g. money, audio, etc).

How about fantasy.scifi.stackexchange.com or scifi.fantasy.stackexchange.com or both? fantasy.stackexchange.com and scifi.stackexchange.com could redirect there.

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    There are quite a few that aren't single words: diy, gis, ui, rpg, boardgames, graphicdesign, stackapps, quant, codegolf, codereview, dba. I'd guess about half are single words, a quarter abbreviations, and the rest portmanteau.
    – Tony Meyer
    Feb 8, 2011 at 3:25
-1

sf.stackexchange.com, specfic.stackexchange.com or spec-fic.stackexchange.com

(i.e. "speculative fiction").

Pros:

  • Short (especially sf).
  • Includes sci-fi, fantasy, and things that I suspect are on-topic but not always considered in either genre, like alternative history.
  • Resembles other StackExchange names, like ui, boardgames, graphicdesign (without a hyphen).
  • sf could be "Sci-Fi", "Sci-fi and Fantasy", or "Speculative Fiction", so is easy to remember. IIUC the domain is fixed, but once we leave beta we have the option to call the site something cute (e.g. cooking.stackexchange.com is "Seasoned Advice"), so it doesn't mean that we'd have to put "Speculative Fiction" in the banner during the beta.

Cons:

  • "Speculative fiction" has always struck me as a little pretentious/academic (perhaps this is just me).
  • Doesn't have "sci-fi" or "fantasy" in the name.
  • There are probably lots of things that "sf" could stand for.
  • "sf" is generally the two-letter abbreviation for "scifi", so it a little like not including fantasy and just shortening the name (c.f. the last pro point).

(Community wiki in case anyone wants to add pros/cons).

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What about SFandF.stackexchange.com?

-4

Why not just:

fiction.stackchange.com?

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    Because that would be literature.stackexchange.com and movies.stackexchange.com. Not all fiction is on topic here, only science fiction and fantasy.
    – Tony Meyer
    Dec 9, 2011 at 4:25
  • @TonyMeyer Now that you mention it, there's quite a bit of overlap between literature.se and this site. It's probably too late for that now, but they could've been merged.
    – Royal Flush
    Dec 9, 2011 at 4:32
  • there was discussion about that both here and on meta.literature.stackexchange.com. The audiences really are quite different, so there's clearly room for both. TBH some of the literature scifi/fantasy questions I would have asked here, but there are others that suit literature.se more (and it's considerably younger than this site).
    – Tony Meyer
    Dec 9, 2011 at 7:29
  • @NullUserExceptionŕ° _ŕ°  Just because there's some overlap doesn't mean the sites should be merged. That way lies Quora.
    – user56
    Dec 9, 2011 at 21:54

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