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First thing to keep in mind is that purpose of hot questions feature is established pretty firmly and that it's not really about helping in your community growth. The feature is there only to show network wide audience entertaining / interesting questions. If you're interested, refer MSE for more details on that: What is the Goal of “Hot Network Questions”?

Because of this, you should not generally expect this feature to work in favor of your community. You can refer examples at Programmers and Workplace to find more details about that. "Tons and tons of people visited the site... but very few decided to stick around..." "flash in the pan..." - that's what you can expect (unless you put dedicated effort into adapting it to your needs, but more on that below).

So, if you want to drop the off-topic question from the hot list, 1) try to get it closed sooner, 2) vote down and 3) abstain of answering. For the latter, additional feature to consider is protection from new users' answers but more on that later.

High exposure of the question to the inexperienced visitors tends to bring answer quality issues:

Stack Exchange team established a dedicated automatic protection feature intended to help with issues like this. If voting on your site is relatively anemic and if site doesn't get many visitors "armed" with association bonus reputation (like it is for example at Stack Overflow), expect basic protection offered by this feature suffice to save you from most troublesome effects of popularity. If voting at your site differs from that one you may find it a bit too fragile - I am not aware of general solution for that, you'd probably have to discuss it at site meta if it grows into substantial problem.

Consider actively editing, checking for repetitive and low quality answers, up to the point of involving moderators in cleaning up and deletion of troublesome content. A solid guidance on the latter was given a while ago by Jeff Atwood:

First thing to keep in mind is that purpose of hot questions feature is established pretty firmly and that it's not really about helping in your community growth. The feature is there only to show network wide audience entertaining / interesting questions. If you're interested, refer MSE for more details on that: What is the Goal of “Hot Network Questions”?

Because of this, you should not generally expect this feature to work in favor of your community. You can refer examples at Programmers and Workplace to find more details about that. "Tons and tons of people visited the site... but very few decided to stick around..." "flash in the pan..." - that's what you can expect (unless you put dedicated effort into adapting it to your needs, but more on that below).

So, if you want to drop the off-topic question from the hot list, 1) try to get it closed sooner, 2) vote down and 3) abstain of answering. For the latter, additional feature to consider is protection from new users' answers but more on that later.

High exposure of the question to the inexperienced visitors tends to bring answer quality issues:

Stack Exchange team established a dedicated automatic protection feature intended to help with issues like this. If voting on your site is relatively anemic and if site doesn't get many visitors "armed" with association bonus reputation (like it is for example at Stack Overflow), expect basic protection offered by this feature suffice to save you from most troublesome effects of popularity. If voting at your site differs from that one you may find it a bit too fragile - I am not aware of general solution for that, you'd probably have to discuss it at site meta if it grows into substantial problem.

Consider actively editing, checking for repetitive and low quality answers, up to the point of involving moderators in cleaning up and deletion of troublesome content. A solid guidance on the latter was given a while ago by Jeff Atwood:

Because of this, you should not generally expect this feature to work in favor of your community. You can refer examples at Programmers and Workplace to find more details about that. "Tons and tons of people visited the site... but very few decided to stick around..." "flash in the pan..." - that's what you can expect (unless you put dedicated effort into adapting it to your needs, but more on that below).

Because of this, you should not generally expect this feature to work in favor of your community. You can refer examples at Programmers and Workplace to find more details about that. "Tons and tons of people visited the site... but very few decided to stick around..." "flash in the pan..." - that's what you can expect (unless you put dedicated effort into adapting it to your needs, but more on that below).

Because of this, you should not generally expect this feature to work in favor of your community. You can refer examples at Programmers and Workplace to find more details about that. "Tons and tons of people visited the site... but very few decided to stick around..." "flash in the pan..." - that's what you can expect (unless you put dedicated effort into adapting this feature to your needs, but more on that below).

Your site is about tulips, but sometimes people make mistake and ask about roses instead. You understand that and let these questions hang around for a while before they get migrated to roses.stackexchange. Some of your users may even shot an advice or two while it's there waiting for migration. If the question is well presented, some may even cast a sympathy upvote - why not if the asker apparently put an effort into crafting their question.

• ^{Hot list readers aren't your site regulars, they have no way to know that it's off-topic, seeing this question will make them think that it's okay to ask about roses here. And don't expect that "tulips" in site URL or "this site is not about roses" comments from site regulars could help - inexperienced visitors won't pay attention to these subtle hints.}

Because of this, you should not generally expect this feature to work in favor of your community. You can refer examples at Programmers and Workplace to find more details about that. "Tons and tons of people visited the site... but very few decided to stick around..." "flash in the pan..." - that's what you can expect (unless you put dedicated effort into adapting it to your needs, but more on that below).

Your site is about tulips, but sometimes people make mistake and ask about roses instead. You understand that and let these questions hang around for a while before they get migrated to roses.stackexchange. Some of your users may even shot an advice or two while it's there waiting for migration. If the question is well presented, some may even cast a sympathy upvote - why not, if the asker apparently put solid effort into crafting their question.

• ^{Hot list readers aren't your site regulars, they have no way to know that it's off-topic. Seeing this question will make them think that it's okay to ask about roses here. And don't expect that "tulips" in site URL or "this site is not about roses" comments from site regulars could help - inexperienced visitors won't pay attention to these subtle hints.}