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Is this information available anywhere? If it's not, should it be available or should it not?

Sometimes I want to ask a question, but I am afraid that not many users are active in the moment. And by the time peak time arrives, my question will get buried and never answered.

It would be even better if we could access peak times for different tags.

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    $\begingroup$ An old discussion about SO peak hours. It seems around 16 GMT is (was) the best to ask a question. Though that answer is around 8 years old :P $\endgroup$
    – kingW3
    Commented Sep 1, 2017 at 17:53
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    $\begingroup$ In a relative sense most questions and answers come in during UTC 16 to 21, that is daytime in the US. But it's just a factor of two between the most and the least busy hour, and it's not even clear what's better. So I would not worry too much about it. $\endgroup$
    – quid
    Commented Sep 1, 2017 at 18:00
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    $\begingroup$ This seems related: Best time to ask a question. (Maybe also some other posts linke there.) On meta.SE: What is the best time to ask questions? You can also see when users post in chat, which is perhaps also a rough approximation for the main site. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Sep 1, 2017 at 18:15
  • $\begingroup$ Thank you all for the info. $\endgroup$
    – Ovi
    Commented Sep 1, 2017 at 18:15
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    $\begingroup$ Re: It would be even better if we could access peak times for different tags. Have a look at: Depending on the tag is there a possibility to know on which days and hours are there more answers? $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Sep 1, 2017 at 18:16
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    $\begingroup$ My guess would be Sunday nights, or Monday nights in the case of holidays like Labor Day. You know, because of homework. $\endgroup$
    – Robert Soupe
    Commented Sep 5, 2017 at 5:29
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    $\begingroup$ Seriously, though, I would be more concerned with making sure my question has all the relevant tags and no irrelevant tags (one of the relevant tags is sure to get more attention than the others, but irrelevant tags might bring a bad kind of attention). $\endgroup$
    – Robert Soupe
    Commented Sep 5, 2017 at 5:29

1 Answer 1

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Sometimes I want to ask a question, but I am afraid that not many users are active in the moment.

That's a valid concern, but the other side of the coin is that there a not many users who are posting questions at that moment. So the users who are active have more chance to view your question.

It turns out that on average, both effect cancel each other out. I demonstrated something similar a year ago on Meta Stack Overflow. That was inspired by a slightly different question (weekday vs. weekend attention). Still, according to this query, there's no visible trend. While the number of questions (blue line) peaks every day around 16:00 UTC, the average # of views per question (orange line) behaves erratically and shows no pattern.

enter image description here

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    $\begingroup$ Views per question $\ne$ activity, since people can view questions long after they've been posted. $\endgroup$
    – Simply Beautiful Art
    Commented Sep 1, 2017 at 22:56
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    $\begingroup$ @SimplyBeautifulArt I don't necessarily disagree with that, but views per question is (IMHO) the easiest and most reliable metric. People can also answer questions long after they've been posted. $\endgroup$
    – Glorfindel
    Commented Sep 2, 2017 at 12:09
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    $\begingroup$ Views by active users ready to answer are presumably almost all from questions on the first page, so I guess Glorfindel's assumption is largely justified. $\endgroup$
    – Hagen von Eitzen
    Commented Sep 10, 2017 at 21:44

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