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This site started private beta before July 2012, so it is no longer "beta", it is a full site by our definition. We've removed the word "beta" from your site banner because we believe that you aren't really a beta site any more, even if you don't get ten questions per day.

Banner that reads "Congratulations" in three-dimensional white text with red, yellow and blue confetti.

What this means for you:

  • the "Beta" is removed from your banner
  • the site is moved to the "Launched" sites list on Area 51 - which will also remove the A51 info box from the right sidebar
  • retain beta reputation levels
  • full-site elections will be delayed but will be scheduled eventually

This is the start of a process that we are already discussing internally and will be bringing to the network for public discussion once the plan is finalized. My hope is that this will mean the end of the monolith we currently refer to as "Graduation" in favor of a well-defined set of small targets to achieve the various elements that made up "Graduation".

I'm sure you have many questions, please feel free to ask and I'll answer what I can. It helps me out a lot if you can limit answers to focus on a single question/subject rather than asking a dozen questions in one answer.

Please feel free to follow the MSE discussion for more background on this decision. You can ask questions either here or there; I'll try to keep up with all of them. Your mods also have some info, so they may be answering in my stead.

Thanks so much for your patience and stay tuned!

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    @LangLangC It might be telling, but I'm not sure what it's telling. Are you suggesting this is a good or poor level of activity for us? overall? We seem to be about middle of the road as far as activity on beta announcement posts goes, but I'm not sure that's much of a metric as far as site health.
    – Caleb
    Aug 5, 2019 at 11:00
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    @Caleb It's not up to par. The blanket graduation is of course a welcome sight for this site. But activity is certainly improvable for the existing community. The 'explosions' over this news on other sites cast a shadow on this one. That others seem much weaker still shouldn't be the yard stick.
    – LаngLаngС
    Aug 5, 2019 at 20:32
  • Finally! Congratulations to all users of BH SE!
    – Reinstate Monica - Goodbye SE
    Aug 6, 2019 at 11:45
  • @LangLangC I'm a high rep user on the site, but tend to look at meta about once a month on average. When I spend time with the site, it generally is to spend a few hours to produce detailed, high quality (I hope) answers for the main site; this is not a site that short answers are usually best for. Good answers take research and showing your work, not information "off the top" of someone's head like some (not all) of the SE sites. So I'm not surprised by the not so rapid viewing of the news about this (here it is 21 days since it was posted and I just got around to seeing it).
    – ScottS
    Aug 21, 2019 at 15:14

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Hahaha!! Had to check it wasn't April 1st. :)) And I thought we'd be in beta forever! But now, "...We were like those who dreamed...".

So: any chance of getting a tweak to our font stack? As ever, I live in hope.

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    Did you calculate if April 1st was 6–8 weeks ago? Or coming up in 6–8 weeks?
    – Caleb
    Aug 5, 2019 at 11:03
  • @Caleb As a matter of fact, I didn't! But now you mention it ... it has to be one or the other.......
    – Dɑvïd
    Aug 5, 2019 at 11:14
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Thanks @Catija, that's great news.

full-site elections will be delayed but will be scheduled eventually

I understand elections aren't just a press of a button for you and you might have a lot to get through, so are you able to let us know roughly where in the queue we are?

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    It's a bit messy. Right now we're delaying all of them until we get a plan formulated. Once we start, assuming we go in order of site creation, you're 13th in the list... but a few sites have had beta elections in the last six months (or are having one currently) so you're probably more like 10th or so. If we can get our automations running, we could do 3-5 at a time initially to test things out but right now we only do 1-2.
    – Catija StaffMod
    Aug 7, 2019 at 14:14
  • Thanks Catija, that's really good to know :)
    – Jack Douglas
    Aug 8, 2019 at 8:38
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I'm thankful for the shift, given that our Questions per Day metric was not likely to ever reach the goal for the topical area we have (without many questions being duplicates). I'm encouraged by the high visits per day, as that shows people coming to find answers to questions already posted.

We need to update some site info, like this Help Center that discusses beta (since we are now not beta).

Questions:

  1. Any real timeline on getting an icon (and do users get any "vote" on the look of the site)?
  2. Does stackexchange do search capability adjustments for full sites, or will that remain in the hands of user implementation that has yet to come about (as of my writing this question, anyway)?
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  • The looks for the sites have been rather sedate since Jin stopped making all the awesome themes. But there never really is a vote on the look. There should be some sort of a contest for 404, error and captcha pages though.
    – Peter Turner
    Sep 4, 2019 at 17:15
  • I can't imagine why anyone would downvote this helpful answer
    – Jack Douglas
    Sep 5, 2019 at 17:02
  • @JackDouglas I wondered about the down vote also, but then thought maybe it was because I asked two questions in one, even though the OP had stated "It helps me out a lot if you can limit answers to focus on a single question/subject rather than asking a dozen questions in one answer." But oh well...
    – ScottS
    Sep 9, 2019 at 21:24

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