116

The Stack Exchange Data Explorer is a very nice and useful tool, but it has one very large drawback: Beta sites are not included at all.

Excluding beta sites probably made a lot of sense when the beta phase was supposed to last only 90 days and when updates to the Data Explorer were performed manually. With sites staying in the beta phase for years now this exclusion doesn't seem justified to me anymore.

All publicly launched sites should be included in the Data Explorer, there are more beta sites than launched sites in existence right now and excluding them does not really make any sense anymore.

Improve this question
7
  • 6
    Note that this question appears to indicate that it is status-completed. That is incorrect: beta sites are not in the SEDE.
    – Thomas Owens
    Commented Jul 21, 2013 at 22:14
  • 6
    + 1 zillion. This would be great, I'd love to play around with it for my site. And from what you said it sounds like it should be a pretty easy change. crosses fingers
    – WendiKidd
    Commented Jul 21, 2013 at 22:19
  • I'd also like to point out that the SEDE update process is now automated. I'm not sure how difficult the process was manually, but it doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to point that process at databases for beta sites.
    – Thomas Owens
    Commented Jul 21, 2013 at 22:29
  • 1
    Rather than all public sites, I think sites that are older than 4 months or so should be added. There should be some meaningful data to explore.
    – asheeshr
    Commented Jul 22, 2013 at 0:36
  • 2
    @AbdulRahman Just my two cents: the proposal is clear and adequately explained in the question; any answer I could post would be little more than "Yes! Everything you said!" So I think most people are letting their upvotes do the talking for them. Unless someone has a case against the proposal or more ideas to add positively to it, probably the only meaningful answer to the question can be from an SE employee commenting on its viability; and they have a lot of work to do so I would expect to wait more than 11 days for that :)
    – WendiKidd
    Commented Jul 22, 2013 at 2:58
  • @WendiKidd: so this request will be accepted feature-request?
    – Abdul Rahman
    Commented Jul 22, 2013 at 3:38
  • @WendiKidd You are right...unfortunately. Instead of identifying what problems exist, and letting people give different answers as to how the problem can be solved (and letting there be separate votes on questions and answers), questions posing and question voting on Meta is a crude tool because of too many cases of questions including their own answers...and then you get question voting where votes of "I think this is/isn't a problem." are indistinguishable from votes of "I like/dislike this particular proposal for addressing it." I wonder how difficult this would be to change...
    – A.M.
    Commented Jul 25, 2013 at 21:05

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
49

Sites in public beta will now appear in the data explorer, refreshed weekly like everything else.

Improve this answer
2
  • 8
    Hallelujah!! ...turns out 6-8 weeks was somewhat accurate :)
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Jan 15, 2014 at 15:30
  • 1
    Allow me to translate this to common parlance: "They all lived happily ever after!"
    – Caleb
    Commented Jan 17, 2014 at 11:39
43
+25

Yes, this!

I don't know why I didn't think of it before. The single most significant thing about a site getting out of beta to me is access to the DE. I've always taken the answer that "beta sites aren't in the DE" as just the way it had to be, but come to think of it there doesn't seem to be a good reason for this any more.

  1. It should take almost no time on the part of developers.
  2. Since beta sites are relatively small in the scheme of things, it shouldn't take up many resources.
  3. The beta phase is exactly when it would be most useful to find certain kinds of trends that only the DE will reveal.
  4. Early beta users are the most likely to be enthusiastic about examining "their baby".
  5. Data dumps are available for failed betas and successful betas. Why not active ones?
  6. Unicorns.

Pretty please?

Improve this answer
0
32
+100

This is in the works, so hopefully beta sites will have their data become available in SEDE within the next few weeks (as of this edit), now that Data Explorer has been moved back to proper hardware.

Improve this answer
3
  • 10
    That's awesome news!!
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Nov 19, 2013 at 2:04
  • 7
    6 to 8 weeks™, the most bittersweet promise in all of Stack Exchange. Keeping my fingers crossed!
    – jmac
    Commented Nov 19, 2013 at 6:09
  • 3
    @jmac Sooner than that, it's mostly just waiting on new hardware to finish coming in. :)
    – Tim Stone
    Commented Nov 19, 2013 at 12:31
26

To elaborate on @Caleb's post, here are two specific examples of how the lack of Data Explorer support for beta sites hurts us:

Please??

Improve this answer
1
  • 6
    Check out Tim Stone's answer!!
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Nov 19, 2013 at 2:04

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .