Congratulations to our 29 oldest beta sites - They're now no longer beta!

Question

If you're a user on a long-toiling beta site that's been waiting 7-8 years to get out of beta, this may be the post you've been waiting for.

The 29 Beta sites that are 7+ years old no longer have the "Beta" label!

I'm on record as saying that we need to ditch the "beta" label for our older sites and get rid of the graduation process - or at least make some major changes to it - and I'm not unique in that. We're well aware of the growing absurdity of sites that are years-old, yet still weighted down with a "beta" indicator for little defensible reason.

The first major step, Design-independent graduation, was an important change that separated graduation from getting a full-site theme... but this still left sites in limbo that couldn't meet the 10 questions per day metric for graduating.

Around the same time we recognized that "small sites" may never hit that target but they can still be successful sites and they wouldn't be at risk of closure unless they failed to maintain moderation levels to keep spam at bay and the questions on-topic and of good quality. This was a great step towards helping y'all feel that your communities would be safe from closure.

In the almost four years since that announcement it's become clear on many of your meta sites and even here on MSE that being unable to get rid of the "beta" label in your banners is a major concern to your communities - and it's time to address that.

What does it mean?

For now, if a site started private beta before July 2012, that site is no longer "beta" - it is a full site by our definition. We've removed the word "beta" from the site banners because we believe that these sites aren't really beta sites any more, even if they don't get ten questions per day.

The sites that qualify will:

• have the "Beta" removed from their banner
• be moved to the "Launched" sites list on Area 51 - which will also remove the A51 info box from the right sidebar
• retain beta reputation levels
• have their full-site elections delayed, but scheduled eventually

This is the start of a process that we are already discussing internally and will be bringing to the network for public discussion once the plan is finalized. My hope is that this will mean the end of the monolith we currently refer to as "Graduation" in favor of a well-defined set of small targets to achieve the various elements that made up "Graduation".

If your site isn't one of these 29, don't fear! This update shouldn't leave you worried that your site may be shut down. Our decision that low-volume sites are still valuable hasn't changed. Some sites being released from beta now doesn't mean the others are failing.

I'm sure you have many questions, please feel free to ask (in an answer) and I'll answer what I can. It helps me out a lot if you can limit answers to focus on a single question/subject rather than asking a dozen questions in one answer.

Thanks so much for your patience and stay tuned!

Full list of sites (ordered by creation date):

• Board & Card Games
• Homebrewing
• Sound Design
• Writing
• Video Production
• Project Management
• Physical Fitness
• Parenting
• Software Testing & Quality Assurance
• German Language
• Gardening and Landscaping
• French Language
• Linguistics
• Biblical Hermeneutics
• History
• Bricks
• Spanish Language
• Computational Science
• Chinese Language
• Русский язык
• Poker
• Psychology and Neuroscience
• The Great Outdoors
• Martial Arts
• Sports
• Windows Phone
• Chess
• Russian Language
• Islam

Answer 1

As an avid user of a site in a similar situation that is not seven years old, I'm very pleased to see this. I do not share the worries expressed in other answers here that similar but younger sites may find this bad in some ways.

I too think that the 10 QPD criterion isn't a good one. Retrocomputing is exceeding all other current criteria, sometimes by a lot. We have a 97% answer rate (far above the 90% criterion) and nearly three times the criterion for number of visits per day. But given the niche appeal of the site, I find it quite possible that it might never meet the 10 QPD criterion.

Yet for someone interested in the topic, Retrocomputing provides an extremely valuable resource not just to find answers to questions, but also as a permanent, stable home for small pieces of original research that would otherwise probably be relegated to some obscure corner of the Internet, or even entirely lost to history. (Take a look for example at this answer which is decidedly non-trivial: it took me several hours of research to find more than half a dozen different sources and extract that information from them. And there's still more that should be added to that; hopefully that will happen over time as I and others stumble across further sources. Without Retrocomputing that would have languished in my private notes, if I bothered to write it up at all, since I have no blog suitable for it and it seems too detailed for Wikipedia.)

A key point of StackExchange sites is to have quality questions. When the QPD metric is the one metric that isn't being met, that provides an incentive to do things that result in more questions, even at the cost of quality. That's not really the kind of incentive that SE wants to be providing. So the message you're now sending, "your velocity isn't important any more" as you said in a comment here is very encouraging.

I also find taking those other sites out of beta now to be encouraging and heartening because it shows you're serious about reworking your criteria. I don't consider it "unfair" to other sites like Retrocomputing, nor do I take it as "stick around for seven years is the new rule." (That rule would indeed be a poor permanent criterion, but it's fine as a heuristic to use once in this situation, where it's clear that the current graduation criteria are were producing the wrong answer to the question, "should these sites remain in beta.")

The job now is to figure out, "what are better criteria that would have gotten these sites out of beta by now." That's likely to take some time, and I see no reason that those sites should have to wait for that to happen, nor do I see any issue with newer sites that are perhaps less obviously "out of beta" material waiting a little longer.

After I wrote this post, JNat confirmed in a comment here the impression I had of this:

Consider this a progressive rollout of a plan still being worked on...the old rules still apply, for the most part; but when the new rules come out, all of these sites would definitely leave Beta — so we just decided to take that step now while all else is being worked on. So this is neither "an extra rule being added" nor "an exception being made," but rather a step forward into a whole new rule set (that's not yet fully defined).

Answer 2

Update: The Windows Phone site has officially been closed.

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Original Post:

discussion

It's a bit odd to see the Windows Phone site graduating. Microsoft discontinued Windows Mobile in 2017 and official support is ending in four months (December 2019).

Is the future for Windows Phone guaranteed? Why graduate a site for a discontinued product?

Answer 3

When will the reputation criteria for privileges on these sites be updated?

For example, I can still vote to close questions on the no-longer-beta Writing, despite the fact that I don't have the amount of reputation there that would normally be required on a graduated site (3,000).

Is this something that will catch up to the status change—and, if so, when?

Answer 4

That's great! It didn't make sense to have well-established sites with stable policies, an established community and sustained activity carry the label “beta”. You haven't found the perfect formula to decide when a site comes out of beta, ok, but that doesn't mean you should do nothing: an imperfect approximation is a lot better than doing nothing.

However, for the foreign language sites specifically, this isn't so great. All the non-English language sites apart from Русский язык cater to three audiences: native speakers, learners who prefer English, and learners who prefer the subject language. Only the second category is currently well-served. These sites accept posts in both languages (English and the subject language), have moderators (both in the sense of reviewers and in the sense of diamond mods) in both languages, but the interface and most of the help text is in English only.

So for us language site communities, the site is still in beta in a very real sense: the interface has a major technical limitation that makes it unappealing to a large part of the target audience, and unsuitable to a significant part. It's hard to recruit French natives when the interface and the help are in English only, and it's hard to retain French natives when there's no progress on the technical front and a scarcity of questions that are interesting to natives.

I'm not saying you shouldn't go ahead and remove “beta” from the name of French Language and the others. After all Japanese Language has been non-beta for a while and doesn't have an interface in Japanese. But for us, this is mostly cosmetic. We're still waiting for proper support for non-English sites. Any incremental improvement towards that goal would be welcome, including an interface in our language and better support for bilingual tags.

Answer 5

feature-request

Can we have these sites added to the footer list of SE sites? This was one of the prerogatives of graduated sites and does seem like an easy thing to do :)

Answer 6

discussion

I figure I might as well ask about the elephant in the room:

Is 7 years the magic number for Beta removal?

Politics.SE, for instance, is 6 years, 8 months old and still Beta. Is graduation now automatic at 7 (which we hit in 4 months), or is this just a one-off "Let's do something about Beta!" event that might happen again in 6-8 weeks?

Answer 7

Wonderful, but...

• If there are no elections,
• There is no unique design,
• They have no community migration pathes,
• The privilege reputation levels are like on the betas,

then may I ask you, exactly what differentiates these sites from a beta?

Answer 8

These 29 sites are no longer labelled as Beta sites due to having completed 7 years, without meeting the current graduation criteria, and presumably without being required to meet any future graduation criteria.

This is great for those sites, and I congratulate them on their many years of striving towards the goal of graduating! However, some of the remaining Beta sites will also pass 7 years within the next few months, and it sounds like they will become subject to new graduation criteria. No matter how easy those criteria are to meet when they have been finalized, I think those communities will be disappointed when they realize how close they were to losing their Beta label too.

While the remaining Beta sites continue to work towards the current, and then towards any future graduation criteria, I think that the "amnesty" given to these 29 sites should also be given to them, but not today, and not necessarily even on their 7th birthday.

Perhaps each year (maybe on 31 December), the Stack Exchange network can recognize the resilience of any Beta sites that completed their 7 years during the preceding calendar year and remove their Beta label.

Answer 9

Even though I'm happy for those sites, I have a mixed feelings on this.

1. SE had metrics for beta sites to graduate.
2. This sites have been doing their best to fit them.
3. And now you just said: "Forget it, it doesn't matter. Just 7 years...".

I'm sure you had a lot discussion with team... For me it looks like you don’t know what to do with beta sites, they aren't met your metrics and they have been in beta for long time, but you don't want to close them. And you took this step. Neither this nor that.

I was expecting more details about graduation process in a public message =/

Answer 10

The arguments are:

1. The sites didn't met the required conditions for departure from beta.
2. The sites were existing for 7 years which is a long time.

Best case scenario:

An extra rule is added. Future sites will depart from beta if they are available for minimum 7 years.

Worst case scenario:

An exception is made. Now the previous rules do apply or not? It is ambiguous which is an enemy of stability.

Answer 11

So as @MrLister asked in the comments of the main posting, does this mean these sites will be able to have their own identifying icons?

Answer 12

There are cryptic references to "future rule changes" here, but it seems to me the SE "voting model" depends critically on having a site with a sufficiently large community that there are knowledgeable members who are not "committed to keeping the site in existence" and as such are happy to downvote poor content wherever it comes from.

As such, this sounds a bit like the spread of "grade inflation" from the US education system in general into SE!

It would be unkind to name specific sites, but I know at least one where several professionals in the field have left, simply because there are a group of prolific contributors who (judging by what they post) don't actually know much about the subject, but who (probably from perfectly innocent motivation, i.e. "when ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise") post poor quality questions, post poor quality answers to them, upvote both of the above, and therefore have rep at levels where more knowledgeable newcomers are unable to catch up, simply because their better quality (i.e. objectively more accurate) answers are not voted up by people who don't know they are good answers.

Of course those problems will tend to affect small sites with more "opinion-based" subjects, not the hard core of STEM and computing sites where most answers can be judged objectively, not subjectively.

Answer 13

The removal of the beta label for these sites is a good thing, and I see no downside. I love the idea of graduation being a series of gradual steps rather than a single huge event that therefore gets put off indefinitely.

I would like to see the new process omit the beta stage for all sites, so any site that survives private beta loses the beta label immediately. Is this being considered as one of the possibilities for the new process?

Answer 14

Congratulations.

Maybe a good milestone to launch https://beta.stackexchange.com

Answer 15

Perhaps someone has discussed this and I miss, but I see one problem: what if because of the low interaction rate of the site, its moderation from the community (upvote, downvote, closevote, reopen-vote, mod nomination & election, etc) cannot function properly? I mean, the threshold is not a random number, it's there to assure that community moderation can work properly. If we allow sites to graduate sooner, would that mean questions are not voted early voted often?

This concern stems from a question that I believe should be reopened, but being unable to reach the threshold. I think the reopen-vote is distinct from other types of vote, because it's about fixing community's mistake, not just expressing one's opinion. On the site of that question, it seems that the core users are just around 10, so the variety is limited.

^{Somewhat related: A main-page question that can also be interpreted as a meta question. What to prepare before asking it?}