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While happily browsing Super User I suddenly noticed this:

Curious, I clicked and landed here. Appears to be ordinary Area51 proposal, one out of hundreds.

Do all proposals get such ad at some point? What is the criteria? Any way to ask for such ad?

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  • For reference, here is the Community Promotion Ads 2013, in which Building Simulation Q&A does not appear.
    – user206222
    Nov 26, 2013 at 9:07
  • @Emracool nice find, never thought to look on the site meta! Chance it's indeed only local to Super User but still no idea what's the source of the ad. :/
    – Shadow Wizard Strikes Back
    Nov 26, 2013 at 9:17

1 Answer 1

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Glad you noticed! We must be doing something right =)

Every once in a while, an Area 51 proposal comes around that we think deserves a little extra help. That turned out to be the case for BPS&A, which had a few interesting things going for it:

  1. It is one of the rare technical proposals driven largely by a community outside the Stack Overflow audience.
  2. It covers a topic in a growing field dominated by "closed" and user-unfriendly mailing lists and forums.
  3. It has an active proposal owner who reached out via Contact and made a convincing appeal for help. It was clear he and his community deserve it.

This criteria for network advertisement isn't set in stone. We are aware that Area 51 has its shortcomings, and we're working to improve the community building process to ensure strong and smart sites launch into private beta. This is just one small experiment in pursuit of that goal.

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    Thanks for the quick and official reply, you surely did it right. Feeling somewhat bad I don't have any personal interest in Building Simulation! ;)
    – Shadow Wizard Strikes Back
    Nov 26, 2013 at 22:07
  • One thing, you do have sites like patents.stackexchange.com/about which skipped Area51 so if there are such strong powers behind that proposal why not skip it as well?
    – Shadow Wizard Strikes Back
    Nov 26, 2013 at 22:15
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    @ShaWizDowArd Ask Patents is pretty exceptional. It was a project that was brought to us by the United States Patent & Trademark Office. It may be that at some point another site bypasses certain stages of Area 51, but that site likely won't be BPS&A.
    – samthebrand
    Nov 26, 2013 at 22:22
  • Fair enough! One last thing for now: get what "BPS&A" is but won't it conflict with this existing trademark in case the site goes live with that acronym? (found while Googling before I just clicked the link to the proposal itself :))
    – Shadow Wizard Strikes Back
    Nov 26, 2013 at 22:34
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    @ShaWizDowArd Well that trademark seems to have lapsed, and I'd think it's probably way too early to start thinking about such things for such an early-stage proposal anyway.
    – samthebrand
    Nov 26, 2013 at 22:56
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    Is it currently possible to request some proposal to be promoted on SO? on Travel we can do that in tag [community-ads], but on SO that tag has supprisingly completely different role.
    – Danubian Sailor
    Feb 13, 2014 at 14:29

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