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Note: I don't mean beta as the scientific name of beet's genus.

Looking at Area51, e.g. our page: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1369/gardening-and-landscaping and comparing with other sister sites, it seems that we are taking much longer to exit Beta, but we are performing also a lot better than others.

We have a lot of visitors, answers and good community. But we really suck on the number of questions per day. On the other hand, we don't need 10 question per day to exit beta. From other (and more recent) sites, a 4.5 per day should be enough.

So, what we should do?

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  • I've wondered that, too. We should tell the administrators of the site to consider the same :)
    – 4-K
    Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 7:01
  • The current criteria for graduation are explained at meta.stackexchange.com/questions/257614/…. We're well below the "sustained 10 questions per day" at the moment because it's fall in the northern hemisphere and we always drop off after mid-summer. There's a chart plotting questions/day and visits/day of all SE sites at docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/…
    – Niall C. Mod
    Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 14:52
  • @NiallC. That is an awesome chart! Thank you so much! Is that updated on a daily basis? Commented Oct 21, 2016 at 18:00
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    Perhaps the better question is: what does not being in beta do for the site?
    – kevinskio Mod
    Commented Oct 23, 2016 at 17:05
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    @kevinsky I agree, and think you should ask that question. If we graduated, many people would lose privileges we have because we're still in beta. It's probably something in the overall system, otherwise sites wouldn't bother, but I'd definitely like to know what benefits graduated sites have that we need. Commented Oct 28, 2016 at 2:20

1 Answer 1

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I'm just going to go ahead and quote a response from a SE Community Manager (Ana), after I inquired about a similar question (see the full text in the link above):

This site is not showing the hockey stick growth we look for as a prerequisite to graduation. And it is entirely okay.

Now, a natural response here might be to push to artificially inflate the rate of posts, but please don't. It nearly always adversely affects quality, and quality is more important. You've got a good thing going here. Instead, know that the place you're at is absolutely fine. You're not set up to graduate anytime soon, but we're proud to have you as part of the Stack Exchange network.

This issue of low activity has been going on since the site came out of private beta, and if there was an easy answer, someone would have already changed it. Here are some recent discussions that relate to where we are as a site currently.

And finally, I have a graph here, charting the site activity over the past 282 weeks. Note that this past summer was quite the best in terms of activity. The 2014 jump was where I was exceptionally active, so not entirely natural. I am really liking how this summer looks! With that kind of growth we will move forward:

enter image description here

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    This is a great post! The reminders to vote are essential, so thanks for linking to those discussions. (We should still be ashamed of ourselves in that department.) The graph is a really helpful tool. Maybe you'd consider adding a new one every once in a while. Since we do have a seasonal aspect to the site, perhaps every quarter would be great. It's also a good way to edit the post and bring it back to the front page for a fresh look. Thanks! Commented Nov 3, 2016 at 21:17

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