There has been some confusion and misunderstanding about the use of Area 51. The problem stems from the lack of clarity into the purpose of each phase. We made some interface and programming changes to alleviate those issues (details below). Unfortunately, those changes also render much of the voting data invalid.
With the new changes, we have:
- Removed all question votes (on-topic and off-topic)
- Recalculated everyone's reputation scores
We have not:
- Removed any proposals or followers
- Removed any questions
- Removed any comments or comment voting
Any reputation gained from account association, e-mail verification, followers, and other non-voting activity will remain with your account. Existing questions are still available for voting so reputation will be regained as voting continues.
It is unfortunate that we have to undo work already put into the system, but we want to work out these kinks early in the beta before the service is announced.
So what does all these changes get us?
The changes are designed to make the desired behavior more self-evident. We have more work to do but nothing this major. So, to help undo some of the misunderstandings and preconceptions the old system caused, here's a quick rundown of how a proposal becomes a site:
(1) Definition (was "Discussion")
Notice the name change. The first phase is not about discussion. Detailed discussion happens later in Beta. The "Definition" phase is about finding some really good "example questions" to define the audience. It's just setting up that basic framework which will be reworked and refined later when the actual community is working on their own site.
When an expert first visits your site, they are going to see questions. And those questions are going to say to them "Yeah! This is the site for me!" ...or they're not. Your goal is to come up with those best questions (what will be asked, and not asked) that exemplifies your site. It's those first questions you would like that hypothetical expert to see when they first see your site.
To encourage users to select the best example questions, each user can only vote for a maximum of 5 on-topic and 5 off-topic questions for each proposal. Users can also now vote "not a good example" to clear out duplicate questions, or questions that don't add to the discussion. Each user can cast at most 50 "not a good example" votes per day.
(2) Commitment
Commitment is the solution to the classic chicken-and-egg problem. A site needs activity to get people to use it. People wont use it if there's no activity. The best way to solve that problem is to reach critical mass, fast. So, commitment makes sure all the seats are filled on opening night.
(3) Beta
Most of the discussion happens here. You start out with a vanilla site with an end goal of molding it into what you want. Behind the scenes you have a meta site to hash out the hairy details: pick your name, your moderators, the design, the rules, you discuss acceptable behavior, you write your FAQ—it's the Constitutional Convention to put together your site's charter.
If everything goes smoothly and your site has sufficient traffic to support itself, you're good to go.