108
votes
Congratulations to our 29 oldest beta sites - They're now no longer beta!
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 ...
- 1,740
88
votes
Congratulations to our 29 oldest beta sites - They're now no longer beta!
Update: The Windows Phone site has officially been closed.
Original Post:
discussion
It's a bit odd to see the Windows Phone site graduating. Microsoft discontinued Windows Mobile in 2017 and ...
- 14.9k
83
votes
Congratulations to our 29 oldest beta sites - They're now no longer beta!
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 ...
- 7,708
62
votes
Congratulations to our 29 oldest beta sites - They're now no longer beta!
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 ...
56
votes
Let's break up with "Graduation" and remove a bunch of "Beta" labels
I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who uses and moderates several low-activity beta sites. I agree that it can be, at times, a bit demoralizing to see some sites quickly graduate,1 while ...
- 32.7k
46
votes
Congratulations to the 59 sites that just left Beta
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, &...
- 13.6k
45
votes
Congratulations to the 59 sites that just left Beta
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 ...
- 26.1k
39
votes
Congratulations to the 59 sites that just left Beta
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 ...
- 32.7k
38
votes
Should we reconsider the requirements for making new cryptocurrency sites?
I'd just prohibit new cryptocurrency proposals entirely.
There is no way to predict which ones will stay for the long run, if even any of them will. And the topic is inherently problematic in many ...
- 185k
35
votes
Congratulations to our 29 oldest beta sites - They're now no longer beta!
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 :)
35
votes
What was it like being a GenAI.SE stakeholder?
What did we do?
The site skipped the usual process of Area 51, and instead opted for an "experimental" launch method. In practice, this turned out to be a chat room and a Teams instance. ...
- 21.6k
35
votes
What was it like being a GenAI.SE stakeholder?
Mainly, I did what I aimed to do: lurk / watch, answer meta questions about decision making where I thought applicable by pointing to how Stack Overflow or the wider network approaches similar things ...
- 21.6k
33
votes
Congratulations to our 29 oldest beta sites - They're now no longer beta!
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 ...
- 5,747
33
votes
Congratulations to our 29 oldest beta sites - They're now no longer beta!
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 ...
- 26.3k
30
votes
Congratulations to the 59 sites that just left Beta
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 ...
- 10.6k
29
votes
Why is Code Golf & Programming Puzzles still in beta?
Just in case you might miss it.
Grace Note in a comment to an answer:
Music and Japanese were in the loop before we set the new criteria.
Aviation hit "eligibility" on October 19th. All 3 had ...
- 1,830
29
votes
De-emphasising the beta designation by removing it from the banner on perpetual beta sites
I agree; being saddled with the "beta" label after close to a decade, for some sites, gives a negative and wrong impression. It's demoralizing. To most people "beta" means "we're still changing ...
- 182k
29
votes
Sites freshly in public beta should not be on Hot Network Questions
I share your concern but proposed solution seems a bit too hard because it would cut network wide "advertising" of a new site right at the moment when it can seriously benefit of being ...
- 10.9k
26
votes
Congratulations to our 29 oldest beta sites - They're now no longer beta!
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 ...
- 35.2k
26
votes
What should the criteria be for Stack Exchange sites to leave beta?
Avid Users
We need a better idea of how many avid users a site has.
Right now Bob who answered one question 5 years ago that hit the Hot Questions list and got 200 reputation from it before ...
- 3,365
23
votes
Let's break up with "Graduation" and remove a bunch of "Beta" labels
I've been excited to respond to this question because it gets at one of the biggest deficiencies I see on the network. After the Area 51 process, there are precious few community achievements. ...
23
votes
Accepted
Will the recent flush of Beta graduations impact sites that meet criteria?
No impact at all. There is still a so-called graduation process in place (even if that process is way broken and changes are in progress).
This was a simple quick-fix for sites that were so ...
- 111k
21
votes
Accepted
What are the limitations in Beta?
The only major differences between a "beta" site and a "graduated" site are:
Beta sites don't have a custom site theme.
Beta sites have lower reputation requirements for their privileges.
Beta sites ...
- 189k
21
votes
Congratulations to the 59 sites that just left Beta
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 ...
- 15.2k
19
votes
Can a beta site voluntarily recommend itself for closure?
This process (more or less) is happening right now on Health. This post on their own Meta pretty much sums it up: Should we initiate assisted dying? and the post score indicates it is representative ...
GlorfindelMod
- 248k
18
votes
Congratulations to the 59 sites that just left Beta
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 ...
- 2,834
16
votes
What should the criteria be for Stack Exchange sites to leave beta?
This question is basically asking something much more abstract: what's the purpose of beta? That is, why do we need this beta state to live between Area 51 idea and a "non-beta" site?
This question ...
- 33.4k
15
votes
How exactly are Area 51 beta stats calculated?
Questions per Day
You can hover over the number to see the tooltip which says "3.5 questions per day on average over the last two weeks". I'm assuming that by average, it's referring to the ...
- 1,877
15
votes
Should we reconsider the requirements for making new cryptocurrency sites?
Cryptocurrencies are a bit like Linux distributions...
There are a lot of them, the smaller ones come and go frequently, and the larger ones have long-lasting, strong communities.
Much in the way that ...
- 27.3k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible