3DPrinting Stack Exchange is leaving Beta in mid-December.
What is Beta?
As the (somewhat out of date) Help Center article says:
“Beta” means that the site is still being defined and constructed.
We as a community have done pretty well at this. We've got over 5000 visits per day of which 2000 are new visitors. In the meta post What does it take to get out of Beta stage? we've tried to explain the progress on the Beta stage. Apart from the minimum questions per day (10 questions per day metric) we're doing quite well for the classic criteria for graduation (note that the smaller SE sites have difficulties to comply to this requirement).
We've got a good understanding of what's on-topic and what's not. Most of our tags have detailed tag wiki excerpts, explaining how and why they should be used. Us Pro-Tempore Moderators are doing less work due to our active users (thank you!). What we still need to work on is voting, see Remember to vote!.
What graduation means
There are several aspects to graduation. These used to be bundled together as an all-or-nothing thing, but they aren't any more. This means:
- Losing the beta label (yes! 16th December 2021, give or take)
- "Graduated" on our Area 51 page
- Removing the “Site Stats” and “Help us grow this site!” boxes shown to anonymous users.
- Moderator elections (2022 or 2023)
- Migration paths, maybe, if we ask for them.
But we won't have:
- Increased reputation thresholds
- Custom site design (but we might get minor customization)
How we can prepare
If you think we shouldn't graduate, for whatever reason, please say so: there's still time to slam on the brakes.
Otherwise, we don't really need to do anything. If you want to, though, here are some ideas:
- Write tag wiki excerpts for every single tag. I think this is achievable, even for weird tags like support, dimensional-accuracy and chamber to name a few.
- Write some basic (knowledgebase) Q&A pairs, or edit/tag existing questions into such. (New-ish users: you're the best for this. If you have had a question about how the site works, chances are it's FAQ-worthy.)
- Answer some unanswered questions or vote to close if appropriate.
- Start thinking of questions for our first moderator election. Also consider who you might want to nominate, and whether you might want to nominate yourself.
Lastly, visit our public 3D printing chat room for some on- and off-topic conversations!
