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I can't find an answer to this question on the "mother" meta website; hope this is not related to my choice of words in the search box.

The statistics of the 3D Printing on Area51 show that only few items (questions and visits per day) are not up to par and need work. Do those need to reach a level of let's say "okay" before the site can loose the Beta stage?

I'm interested to know what would be the requirements to get out of the Beta stage.

Update September 5, 2019:

It appears that the "visits per day" is "excellent" with close to three thousand visits. The "questions per day" still lack behind with a 3.0 value ("needs work") while more than 5 is considered "healthy". All further stats seem to be "okay" or "excellent".

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This post, 3D Printing SE Beta Status, by tbm0115 highlights the three main sticking points (IMHO clearer than the Area 51 page):

  • Questions per day
  • Users vs Reputation
  • Visits per day

Once those reach the required levels then that should be it. So, there is quite a way to go...

It is worth noting that tbm0115's post was roughly six months ago - since then all of the stats have got even worse, with the exception of users vs rep. The worst stat, by far, is visits/day which is apparently only 4!?!? That can't be right, surely?

The stats can be seen here, 3D Printing Area51 site:

Stats progress

  • Questions per day 2.1 -> 1.9 1.6 2.1 2.7 2.1 1.7 2 2.4
  • Answer rate 96% -> 93% 95% 96% 97% 98% 96%
  • Users
    • 200+ reputation 56/150 -> 103/150 113/150 139/150 144/150 151/150 161/150 164/150 179/150
    • 2,000+ reputation 4/10 -> 8/10 9/10 10/10 11/10 12/10 14/10 17/10
    • 3,000+ reputation 3/5 -> 4/5 6/5 7/5 8/5 9/5
  • Answers per question ratio is 2.0 -> 1.9
  • visits per day 753 -> 4 2,324 2648 2675 2774 2844 3041 3707

Additional points of note

The stats above aren't really the be all to end all... there are a few other considerations that I came across here, in this answer, to “Graduation” of this Community:

  1. A number of 10k+ users ( n > 3 ) are required to access mod tools
  2. A number of 3k+ users ( n > 10 ) are required to be able to fully vote

The final hurdle

The main sticking point, according to this meta post on Ethereum, Congratulations! Ethereum is graduating!, is 10 questions per day, which we are a long way from, and seems to be the last remaining issue. A link (Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites) from the Ethereum meta post to Meta.SE states:

When a site starts to consistently receive 10 questions/day, we’ll consider it for graduation.

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  • $\begingroup$ I've seen that post. Although it states that in the post, there is no reference mentioned. Maybe it boils down to too less (active) member and too many alternatives. $\endgroup$ – 0scar♦ May 25 '18 at 8:22
  • $\begingroup$ The visitors count is borked at the moment: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/308966/… $\endgroup$ – PeterJ May 25 '18 at 12:59
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    $\begingroup$ Yikes, yeah that BETTER be wrong. Maybe we need to work on active recruitment. Also we should hold each other accountable and be friendly especially to newer members. I don't think people realize that telling others to follow the rules not unkindly but not kindly can chase away members. $\endgroup$ – StarWind0♦ Jun 1 '18 at 16:43
  • $\begingroup$ @StarWind0 - Yes, I couldn't agree more, kindly see my answer to Posting Closing issues. $\endgroup$ – Greenonline♦ Jun 1 '18 at 19:27
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I was running out of space in the comments, so I'm just moving this to a full blown answer.

According to the magic Moderator portal, we should be around 2,350 in visits per day. Also, my post was a little over a year and half ago.

To elaborate on my original post that @Greenonline attributed and reiterate the points:

Accept Answers

I have mentioned the accepted answers issue before as well in a separate post, but there are currently 571 unaccepted-answer questions WITH at least 1 answer available out of 1,467 as of 06/06/2018 11:12pm UTC-7 (Pacific). That's almost 40% of our content ripe for reputation. That equates to 8,565 reputation points just by purely accepting one of the available answers.

I've periodically used the link above to retroactively remind users that they can approve of an answer. There's nothing wrong with reminding users in the comments, so long as it is asked appropriately. If you don't know how to word it, feel free to steal my wording from the post above.

Vote

I'm not the best at remembering to vote, but I typically vote both on the answer(s) that helped me AND the question(s). I think questions easily get overlooked in the voting process, but it does help our newer visitors.

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    $\begingroup$ One of the ways people can assist with the unaccepted answer is to post a small blurb as a comment to the answer itself back to the OP, that being something like, "If this answers your question, please select the check mark to the left showing as such." This isn't asking for points, necessarily, but rather is an attempt to clean up the unanswered questions. I believe for what is shown as "unanswered", SE takes into account answers which have been upvoted as having an answer, whether the OP has clicked the check-mark or not. $\endgroup$ – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Jul 19 '18 at 15:44
  • $\begingroup$ You are correct about the questions often being overlooked, and I think that it is for that reason, that the electorate badge requires 25% of votes being on questions, and the same (or stricter) applies to Vox Populi too, I believe but (after re-reading the badge description) I might be wrong, although I do vaguely remember reading a meta post that advised only voting for questions (when I first joined SE years back) in order to get the badges in the most efficiently possible way. $\endgroup$ – Greenonline♦ Aug 7 '18 at 9:50
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Your "vote" is one of the key things. As Jon Ericson pointed out to Mechanics.SE before we graduated and were asking the same question asked here, he stated:

... voting is the engine that drives the reputation economy.

I think Mech had a little different scenario than does 3D Printing, but it still holds true. If you want people to show up and do things, you (and everyone else) needs to vote. Up, down, sideways ... doesn't matter. They all help drive people to do things in every Stack.

Looking at the above link, you can see one of the things which is important to graduation is having the right user base. You have to have people who have the ability to do things which only those who have met the point level can do. As it stands the highest ranked person by point total is Tom van der Zanden. He hasn't (as of this writing) broached 10k points. There are two users who have more than 5k points, and another five who are over 2500. How do you improve this scenario? You guessed it, by voting.

I realize with sub two questions per day (QPD), there's not a lot to vote on. That can be overcome as well. Those of you who have had issues or have met challenges have knowledge. Write down those challenges you've faced in a question. Then, either write an answer for them, or let someone else figure them out. Either way, you are creating opportunity for the site to expand. That opportunity will be giving someone a chance to vote and/or answer the question. Plus, you are doing what SE wants done in the first place: bringing and recording knowledge. It's a win-win.

There's a ton of other things which can be done to get 3D Printing graduated. I'm sure we'll get there sooner or later. I hope I can help in some small way. I'm not the bastion of all knowledge to get a site graduated, that's for sure, but having gone through it with Mechanics gives me some insight.

Here's to the future and what it will bring.

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    $\begingroup$ Before updating my question I already had been thinking about increasing the questions per day by posting questions and answer's, in fact I was about to bring this up here in a separate post. As you said, it is a good thing to record knowledge, I hope more of the regular users are willing to do that. $\endgroup$ – 0scar♦ Jul 5 '18 at 22:23
  • $\begingroup$ @0scar - I'm sure I'll have plenty of questions going forward. $\endgroup$ – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Jul 5 '18 at 22:29
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One thing that I noticed about the stats for this site when I first came across it was how high the number of registered users and visits is, compared with the number of active users and questions.

For some time, I felt the site had either picked up some bad stats, or was in the final stages of fading away. I think things are a little more normal now though.

It seems that we still have a bit of a problem with becoming sticky for lots of users. We're at 151 200 rep users (out of 10k), and IoT is at 149 out of 7k, so it seems maybe we're not too far apart. The big difference seems to be the number of views. 1.2k per day on IoT, and 2.8k here (maybe expected since views depend on visibility of the site spreading over time).

Are people really coming here and finding answers to their questions? Are they coming here and asking a single question? Are we on the wrong end of cheap printers with poor support, holding back the really interesting questions?

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  • $\begingroup$ Talking about my own case, I know that I'm not really looking for answers here as I have an Ultimaker and they have a very active community on their forums. They got a handful of very active people on there, mostly users but also a few employees, who reply to most question in the same day or so, and the forums is a trove of answer. Plus the fact that they have forums in languages other than english means that not many people who own an ultimaker or use cura will look elsewhere for answers to their questions. $\endgroup$ – Sava Nov 7 '18 at 1:19

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