Congratulations to the 59 sites that just left Beta

Question

This is an exciting day for all of us who work on community here, and for the communities that have given thousands of hours of their time to build sites on the Stack Exchange network. Today, we are excited to announce that 59 sites are bidding adieu to their Beta statuses. The last time we did something like this was in 2019, when we announced that 29 of the sites that had been in Beta for seven or more years at that time would be ditching their Beta labels. Since then, many of the other communities that were still in Public Beta have made it clear that they were anxious to shed their label too.

So which sites are leaving Beta?

Today is a celebration! The communities that are shedding their Beta label today have worked hard over the past years to build high-quality content around their subject area, and I hope that you’ll join me (and I speak for the whole Community Team, and the company) in congratulating the communities and moderator teams that built the following sites:

• Stack Overflow in Japanese
• 3D Printing
• Amateur Radio
• Artificial Intelligence
• Arts & Crafts
• Astronomy
• Beer, Wine, & Spirits
• Bioinformatics
• Buddhism
• CiviCRM
• Craft CMS
• Coffee
• Computer Graphics
• Computer Science Educators
• DevOps
• Drones and Model Aircraft
• Earth Science
• Ebooks
• Economics
• Engineering
• EOS.IO
• Esperanto Language
• Expatriates
• Freelancing
• Genealogy & Family History
• Hinduism
• History of Science and Mathematics
• Iota
• Internet of Things
• Italian Language
• Joomla
• Korean Language
• Language Learning
• Latin Language
• Lifehacks
• Literature
• Mathematics Educators
• Matter Modeling
• Monero
• Mythology & Folklore
• Open Source
• Operations Research
• Pets
• Politics
• Portuguese Language
• Quantum Computing
• Retrocomputing
• Reverse Engineering
• Robotics
• Sitecore
• Space Exploration
• Stellar
• Sustainable Living
• Tezos
• Tor
• Tridion
• Ukrainian Language
• Vi and Vim
• Woodworking

FAQ

What are the criteria for a site to leave Beta?

We have over 170 communities in the Stack Exchange network, and each community is unique (and not just in terms of subject matter focus).

When Area 51 and the site lifecycle were originally conceived, there was a set of rigid requirements around losing the Beta label – including things like “has at least 10 questions asked per day”. We’ve acknowledged in the past that some of the original parameters would be hard for smaller communities to hit, and we’ve always believed in iteration as a technique to polish both practice and policy. The 29 sites that left Beta in 2019 didn’t need to meet that “questions-asked-per-day” threshold, and we chose to maintain that interpretation this year, meaning that once again this wasn’t a criterion for leaving Beta.

Another former requirement for leaving Beta was that at least 90% of open questions have at least one upvoted answer. Again, this felt like it would be harder for some communities to meet than others. When we looked to our existing sites for benchmarking, we discovered that Stack Overflow currently has 70% of open questions with at least one upvoted answer, and that felt like a more appropriate baseline to judge against.

For the sites that are leaving Beta today, the following criteria were determined:

• The site needed to be in public Beta for at least six months
• The site needed to have at least 1000 open questions
• At least 70% of the questions on the site needed to have at least one upvoted answer

There is one exception we did make for a community, and that was on the Artificial Intelligence site (AI). AI did not meet the “70% of questions with at least one upvoted answer” threshold, but their community has received three different sponsorships while in Public Beta. That is more than any other site on the Stack Exchange platform. In addition to that, their site already has a design as part of their first sponsorship, and has been consistently close to meeting the old 10 question-per-day criteria for leaving Beta.

Coincidentally, as we were reviewing sites that would be eligible for leaving Beta, their community had reached out to ask when they would be losing that label. We felt that the contributions AI has made over the years are an equally valuable proxy for a measurement of a healthy and valuable community. So we approached their moderator team to see if they felt ready to turn in their Beta label, since we strongly felt that they were. They agreed, and we’re excited that AI is joining the other sites that are leaving Beta today.

Another process change was introduced today: For this group of eligible communities, we allowed the communities to stay in Beta if they didn’t feel ready to leave that state yet. A couple of sites indicated that they felt they wanted to focus on increasing engagement in their communities a bit, and didn’t feel like now was the right time to leave Beta.

If your community is one of the remaining sites with the Beta label, have no fear. We actually have some exciting news to share with you.

When’s the next time this will happen?

This is hopefully the last time the Community Management Team will have to do a bulk Beta label removal event. In the past, moving a site out of Beta required a developer’s assistance to remove the Beta label and to either keep reputation levels lowered or bring them up to the regular levels – I speak more to this in the next section. This meant that for the last few years, we’ve only been able to orchestrate sites leaving Public Beta when we and our Public Platform engineering team both had time to dedicate to the task.

Now, thanks to one of the amazing engineers on our Public Platform team (Adam Lear, take your bow), the CMs have a tool to allow us to do this without a developer. So in the future, if a site is eligible and ready to leave Beta, we can process those requests ad-hoc and in a more timely manner.

I tested the tool out today – and if you are reading this post, it should signal that I didn’t break anything.

What does it mean to lose the Beta label?

Similar to when we did this two years ago, sites that were eligible and opted to leave Beta will:

• have the word “Beta” removed from the banner at the top of the site
• be moved to the “Launched” sites list on Area 51 - which will also remove the Area 51 information box from the right sidebar of the site
• retain the artificially-lowered reputation thresholds for site privileges, so that those thresholds stay the same as in Beta
• have their full-site moderator elections scheduled in the future (more on that in the next section)
• be eligible for community ads in 2022 (we'll be talking about that more in the new year)

In the past, we were able to offer a custom site design to graduated sites. Although site redesigns aren’t happening right now, we have a shared interest internally in experimenting with ways to get this or similar benefits back. We know the sites that lost their “Beta” label in 2019 are still waiting for a redesign, too. We hope that some sort of design love (or perhaps theme customization) will come in the future, but we don't have concrete details of what this will look like or a timeline of when this will happen.

When can sites losing the Beta label expect to have their elections?

You may remember that the Public Platform engineering team spent the first half of this year building tools for the Community Managers to help enable us to hold elections more frequently. This resulted in significant increases in CM productivity, with an outcome that we were able to hold nearly 1.5 times as many successful elections in 2021 as we did in 2020 – that’s a total of 69 elections in 2021, compared to 43 in 2020. In addition to running elections for sites that found themselves in need of additional moderators due to an increase in site activity or moderator resignation, we also had time to start going through the backlog of sites that lost the Beta label in 2019 and still needed an election to transition from pro-tem moderators to “full” moderators.

While the majority of those elections went smoothly and fit the model well, we did run into a handful that didn’t have enough candidates to make the election competitive. In those cases, we treated the elections like pro-tempore elections. (There are a number of differences between a pro-tempore election and a standard election, but the major one is that a pro-tem election doesn’t need to be competitive: a site can have the same number of candidates as “seats” to fill, or less.) Some smaller sites asked to hold off on scheduling their post-Beta elections because they considered that they might not have enough candidates interested to make it competitive.

With that in mind, some members of the Community Management team are going to spend some time in early 2022 working with community members (including moderator teams) to understand what can be improved about the election experience in general (and in this case, rather than just building tools, we also want to look at areas where policy or process can be tweaked).

One area we are exploring is whether the “one size fits all” approach of looking for four candidates to have a competitive “full” site election, with a resulting winning group of three moderators, makes sense for smaller sites.

The focus of this elections project is much broader than our earlier tooling project and will focus on a variety of areas. We’ll have more to share in early 2022 when the project kicks off, but this feels like a good opportunity to provide some insight into what we think the next steps in formalizing site lifecycle may be.

We have currently paused all elections, as we usually do around this time of the year, due to the difficulty of scheduling end-of-year elections over travel, religious, and work holidays (both ours and those of the various communities involved). When elections kick off again in February 2022, we’ll be starting with sites that had indicated in Q4 of 2021 that they needed an election. Some of these sites include ones that left Beta today, and our team will be working with them to schedule their elections. We won’t be scheduling the majority of elections for sites leaving Beta until at least April of 2022.

Answer 1

I also wanted to shout out that some of these sites recently celebrated anniversaries or have upcoming ones in the next few weeks.

Congrats to:

• Politics and Sustainable Living (9 years)
• Beer, Wine, & Spirits, Ebooks, and Italian Language (8 years)
• Stack Overflow in Japanese, Coffee, Economics, Engineering, and Lifehacks (7 years)
• 3D Printing and Ethereum (6 years)
• Internet of Things and Literature (5 years)
• Iota and Stellar (4 years)

Answer 2

_{Disclaimer: I'm not active on Area51 and do not have experience starting a Q&A site of my own.}

I partially-oppose this move due to the excessive relaxation of graduation criteria.

While some of the sites are certainly deserving AFAICT of being permanent non-betas (e.g. Politics, Japanese, and that's just a couple I've browsed a few times recently), some seem too niche, small and low-activity. To give a concrete example:

Iota.SE regards the iota cryptocurrency a "open-source cryptocurrency for IoT that does not use a blockchain" (quoting the FAQ). It has 1,022 questions overall. Since the beginning of this month (December 2021), either 2 or 3 new questions have been asked; 3 earlier questions have been modified or answered; and another one modified by a bot. According to the reputation leagues, this months only two users gained reputation - 10 points each.

To the iota.SE users and admins - I'm sorry for having "picked" on you. I'm sure you've invested time and effort in that site. But - it really does not look to me like a viable active Q&A community.

---

PS - On further reflection, I also wonder why this wasn't posted beforehand rather than after-the-fact.

Answer 3

I'm a moderator on three of the sites that are graduating and have been a part of several others, and this feels pretty surreal. I started in 2014, and 7 years is . . . well, it's a long time. I personally eventually adopted the assumption that we'd never graduate - which wouldn't be a bad thing, given that our activity levels were reasonably healthy. It just left me with a vaguely unsatisfying feeling. From time to time, I admittedly wondered whether we could get the axe if company priorities changed. This mass graduation puts a good deal of that low-level anxiety to rest. It's a great feeling.

This really does feels like another huge step in the arc that began with the reassessment of graduation in 2015 (I still remember that discussion!), eventually leading to new determinations of what a "healthy" site is like. Nixing the questions-per-day threshold really addresses my last remaining gripes about the old metrics. It also gives me hope for future Stack Exchange sites (as does the pending Proof Assistants launch, and the rest of the ongoing lifecycle analysis).

Thank you to all the folks at Stack Exchange who made this possible. You've made a lot of people very happy.

Answer 4

To the Stack Exchange Community Management Team for putting efforts in evaluating communities and fabricating the criteria!

By the way, it's mentioned that

For the sites that are leaving Beta today the following criteria were determined:

• The site needed to be in public Beta for at least six months
• The site needed to have at least 1000 open questions
• At least 70% of the questions on the site needed to have at least one upvoted answer

And it's also said that by the grace of Adam Lear,

So in the future, if a site is eligible and ready to leave Beta, we can process those requests ad-hoc and in a more timely manner.

So, we are curious to know whether this is the latest applicable criteria for a beta site to become eligible from now onwards? If not, we look forward to know the update after this obsolete post: Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites

Answer 5

You said (emphasis mine):

In the past, moving a site out of Beta required a developer’s assistance to remove the Beta label and either keep reputation levels lowered or bring them up to the regular levels

But then, under the "What does it mean to lose the Beta label?" section, it says:

retain the artificially-lowered reputation thresholds for site privileges, so that they stay the same as in Beta

This raises the following question:

Are there separate criteria for bringing privileges' rep thresholds to the regular levels when (or some time after) a site leaves beta?

Answer 6

As a moderator to one of the sites that just graduated I'd like to say thank you everyone who made this possible: the CMs, SE staff, the fellow moderators and of course all the diverse users who joined up and asked questions, answered them, and helped keep the site clean and functional.

I'm hoping for another constructive 7 years, and I'm glad we'll likely have an easier way to graduate sites in the future.

Answer 7

The post says:

For the sites that are leaving Beta today, the following criteria were determined:

• [...]
• The site needed to have at least 1000 open questions
• [...]

There is one exception we did make for a community, and that was on the Artificial Intelligence site. [...]

There appears to be another exception: Drones & Model Aircraft has 648 total questions (634 of which are open) and therefore didn't meet the 1000 question requirement.

Answer 8

support area-51

Is there any plan to update Area 51?

As of right now, Politics still shows up as beta on Area 51¹, and the old stats required for graduating are still showing up on Cardano.

Are there any plans to update Area 51?

¹As mentioned in Rosie's comment this no longer happens, if it still shows up for you (and you're quite certain it isn't caching) then it's probably a bug.

Answer 9

For this group of eligible communities, we allowed the communities to stay in Beta if they didn’t feel ready to leave that state yet.

How was this determined? I didn't see any consultation happening on my 'primary' site -- we were presented with a 'fait accompli' early announcement that didn't include much important information, such as the fact the reputation thresholds wouldn't change immediately (it will be an issue when they do change, so I hope users are consulted then) and also didn't include any indication that we could ask not to be included.

The site moderator(s) I've challenged on this have said 'we didn't know' and 'we weren't asked', which either indicates that there was a communications failure -- perhaps between SE and the moderators community? or between the moderators and the site community?

Answer 10

On behalf of the Korean Language community, I would like to thank the Stack Exchange team for graduating our site out of beta.

Answer 11

There seems to be at least one other exception. Cardano.SE meets those criteria but did not graduate. They reached 1000 questions (with more than 80% answered), weeks ago. The site has also been live for more than 8 months (and in Public Beta for more than 7 months). Therefore all three of the itemized criteria listed in this question, were met 11 days ago when it was posted. Cardano might simply have been overlooked because they weren't yet at 1000 questions (though they were very close to it) back in November when the CMs were first looking into this.

I do understand that some sites met the requirements but requested not to graduate, but I confirmed on the Cardano.Meta site that the community didn't request this, and the diamond moderators didn't either.