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I hope this doesn't open Pandora's Box regarding public beta site graduation. I read several posts on the topic and realize it has generated a lot of discussion. Let's break up with "Graduation" and remove a bunch of "Beta" labels

For reference, this question is about the CS50 Beta site. It is intended for students taking one of Harvard's CS50 courses to post questions about their problem sets.

After reading about the 2 previous rounds of beta site graduations (in 2019 and 2021), I'm curious why the CS50 beta site didn't graduate. Links and criteria for previous graduations:

Criteria for the 2019 graduation:

  1. The site needed to be in public Beta for at least 7 years.

Criteria for the 2021 graduation:

  1. The site needed to be in public Beta for at least 6 months.
  2. The site needed to have at least 1000 open questions.
  3. At least 70% of the questions on the site needed to have at least one upvoted answer.

Associated statistics (on Feb 22, 2023) for CS50 Beta are:

  1. It has been in public Beta for 9 years (since 2014), with 13,319 questions.
  2. It has 1,022 questions with no answers (this is an "open question" - right?).
  3. 75.4% of the questions have at least one upvoted or accepted answer. (There are 3,273 questions with no upvoted or accepted answer.)

I don't have statistics at the time of 2021 graduation. It's possible there were not 1,000 open questions at that time. Is that the reason? Were there other reasons?

When is the next graduation phase scheduled? Is it possible CS50 will be eligible at that time?

As an aside, there is also a cs50 tag on Stack Overflow. It has another 3,242 questions – 397 questions have no answers and 1,015 questions have no upvoted or accepted answers. Ideally, graduating the beta site would redirect these problem set questions to a more appropriate site.

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The CS50 site might be reasonably old and active enough, but its community is not. See this answer by a former staff member and perhaps also this one for more details.

For a more technical reason, only public beta sites are considered for graduation; you mentioned that yourself. CS50 is in (perpetuate) private beta, which you can see from the privilege levels which differ from public beta sites like the newest one.

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    The technical reason isn't really necessary. This site is not eligible simply because it's not a normal site created. There was another one like it, I don't remember the name, that we closed down because it stopped being actively used. And if the CS50 site stopped being actively used by Harvard, we would not hesitate to close it down immediately.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Feb 22 at 20:58
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    I bet it's edx-cs169-1x ...
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Feb 22 at 21:00
  • @aminuson, got it. Thanks, it wasn't clear (to me) that this is a private beta site. The only way to determine this is by comparing privilege levels to a public beta site?
    – kcw78
    Feb 22 at 21:26
  • @kcw78 given the other filters you applied, it's sufficient to check that the domain name does not start with cs50. :)
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Feb 22 at 21:33
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    Sorry, you lost me. How does the URL differentiate public vs private? The private beta site is CS50 Beta and the public beta site is Solana Beta Is the beta status displayed on the site's Home page?
    – kcw78
    Feb 22 at 22:56
  • Re "in ... private beta": But it is visible to all (e.g., when logged out). Aren't private betas supposed to be hidden from view, only accessible to a select few?
    – This_is_NOT_a_forum
    Feb 23 at 1:31
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    OK, maybe it's more of a hybrid between private and public. Like private betas, it is not included in SEDE; unlike them, it does have appointed moderators.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Feb 23 at 8:12

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