_{Disclaimer: I've poked through Lifehacks Stack Exchange a few times before. I'm going to try to keep this as generalized as I can, but I may point out a few trends that I've noticed specific to LH.SE.}

Whenever there is a problem like this in a Stack Exchange community, one of these things is almost always the problem: site scope not clear, site scope not read by new users, no 'conversions,' and bad traffic.

Scope Not Clear: There is always a bit of site scope issues with a new SE community (Community Building has had our fair share) but there gets to be a point when the scope issue is too broad.

It seems like your scope is incredibly clear from meta ("out of the box thinking"), but not everyone agrees on how to execute this scope. For example, there are 2K users who have their questions closed. Sure, things happen, but the first step is to make sure all of your top users are on the same page and everything is laid out on meta clearly. It seems as you've already done this, but it doesn't hurt to be sure that everyone knows about this.

Scope Not Clear to New Users: There isn't much you can do about this. Stack Exchange doesn't provide a lot of tools to help with this issue. It seems like you just have to close questions and leave quality comments.

Convert Bad Questions to Good Questions: Speaking of quality comments, I've found that, with all moderation, the best comments are in a four part response:

• Some sort of greeting
• What they did wrong
• How they can fix it
• Some sort of "thanks"

For example:

Welcome to Lifehacks Stack Exchange! For a question to be on topic here at Lifehacks, it must be asking for an out of the box solution, not just a simple how-to. For more information on what's on topic, please see this post. Please use the edit button to edit your question to include more details of why the current solutions aren't ideal and what you expect in a good solution. Thanks!

This is friendly, it tells them what's wrong, it tells them how to fix it (turning a bad question into a good one). Furthermore, it gives them links that they can look at to further their understanding. I've noticed that people are more likely to read links after their question has been closed, so it's especially important to educate the OP and give them an easy path for reopening the question.

Currently, most of your closing comments don't have this call to action and/or they don't explain what's wrong in the first place. Telling them it's off topic is fine, but they'll never learn and are going probably walk away if you don't show them how to fix their question.

You need to educate your community on this to try to get some questions reopened by an edit from the OP (feel free to use this post as a base for the meta post). Even if a question seems unsalvageable, it's still a good idea to let them know how they can improve their question to be courteous.

This Chrome plugin will be especially useful for having these high quality comments already typed out.

Analyzing Traffic for Bad Advertisement: One last thing that you should do as a mod is to use the moderator analytics tools. Try to identify if there are any sources of traffic that generate low quality posts. For example, an advertisement on a general forum might not be the best idea if everyone there is looking for inside the box answers on that forum. Try to get any negative traffic removed if you can. This approach is by far the hardest to execute with limited data, but it can also be highly effective if you can draw conclusions.