To celebrate making it to public beta, I’m of course asking a question about leaving public beta.
What are the requirements to clear the beta phase entirely? What targets should we as a community focus on in particular? As I recall from Area 51, our number of daily visits was a bit low. Anything else?
From Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites:
When a site starts to consistently receive 10 questions/day, we’ll consider it for graduation.
While this isn't always true, most sites don't end up graduating before reaching ten questions per day. The other Area 51 statistics play a much smaller role in determining if a site is ready for graduation.
Other than ten questions per day, everything else is site-specific. Once it's clear that a community will still work well with the increased reputation requirements and other effects of graduation, it's likely to graduate.
What targets should we as a community focus on in particular?
Bringing in more users and encouraging them to participate. A larger and more active community means a better site, and this will also bring us closer to graduation.
Also remember that it is not a race to finish beta. There are plenty of useful, healthy sites that have been in beta for 5, sometimes almost 10 years. They still produce good content, but aren't quite ready to graduate. It's okay if we stay in beta for a long time; as long as this community continues to grow and OR.SE continues to produce helpful content, we'll be making the world a better place and moving closer and closer to graduation.
This post on main meta seems to be the main word on this question. In short, the main criterion for "graduation" seems to be that the site gets 10+ questions/day, on average, for a good while. There also seems to be a good amount of variability around that guideline; there is some degree of subjectivity in the decision to allow a site to graduate. Some sites stay in beta for several years. Some seem like they might remain in beta indefinitely.
The main Area 51 stat that is considered for graduation is the questions-per-day stat. On the other hand, the stats are certainly all correlated, so it's great if we can keep all of those stats as healthy as we can.
Also worth quoting, from Robert here:
90 days is a minimum length. Most sites will take much longer. Longer-running betas are not in some sort of failure mode, nor are they "trapped."
I guess the main thing we can do from here on out is to promote the site as much as we can, encourage lots of our colleagues, students, and friends to use it, and try to keep the number of (high-quality) questions up as much as possible.
Hopefully the 10 question/day graduation criterion will be relaxed.
From Aug 1, Congratulations to our 29 oldest beta sites - They're now no longer beta!
"Is it time to “graduate” or make a determination on some of the older beta sites?".
Search: "Questions tagged [beta-phase]".
Each stage is evolving and sometimes the answer becomes firmer while othertimes there's a bit of skating around. By voting and writing better answers on the main Meta you can help to direct the owners towards what the community would prefer. Even a great idea takes time and money to move forward, sometimes things move slower than can be explained.
Recently a number of sites moved forward, for some the wait was very long.
Constructive Q&A's on the main Meta helped, now the revisiting and refinement occurs.
If it's clear the site should graduate, it should - in practice that's not always the case.
