What's keeping the site in beta, and what can we do to get it graduated?

Question

Current Status of ELL

So far as I can tell, as a beta site, ELL's statistics are superlative:

• 29.4 questions per day: E̲x̲c̲e̲l̲l̲e̲n̲t̲ (vs. 15 for average)
• 97% answered: E̲x̲c̲e̲l̲l̲e̲n̲t̲ (vs. 90% for healthy)
• 577 avid & 9,750 total users: E̲x̲c̲e̲l̲l̲e̲n̲t̲ (all statistics strongly above threshold)
• 1.8 answer ratio: O̲k̲a̲y̲ (vs. 2.5 for good)
• 20,520 visits/day: E̲x̲c̲e̲l̲l̲e̲n̲t̲ (vs. 1,500 for good)

That is, all the published metrics which beta sites are measured against are top-flight, excepting "answer ratio".

Question:Answer ratio?

A similar question about ELL's beta status was asked a year ago, and @J.R. responded with exactly this concern:

I'd like to see more questions that get more than one answer. Oftentimes, one answer seems to tell the whole story, and nobody else weighs in.

But in my opinion, that is the very nature of this site, and it's unlikely to change. This is a site for beginners, the questions will necessarily have obvious (if not necessarily simple) answers.

Thus, after the first answer gives the (almost always extant) definitive response, there likely will not be enough nuances to elaborate on to make it worth the while of other avid users to post a response; in other words, given basic questions, multiple answers would necessarily have enough overlap to discourage any answer after the first.

And, critically, given the charter of this site, that's unlikely to ever change.

Patience?

The only other reason given in the cited question is

I think the SE folks are probably not in a hurry to graduate any site; they don't want graduate a site that begins with an initial burst of excitement but eventually fizzles out. Better to graduate a healthy site late than to graduate an unviable site too early.

Which the administrator @Anna Lear responded to with:

Your last paragraph [referring to the one I just quoted] especially is spot on. I just want to add that we do regularly monitor every beta site. We review the periodic site evaluations that are conducted via /review and monitor other stats like traffic patterns, user engagement, and overall main & meta participation.

Which seems, in sum, to counsel patience.

But ELL has been in beta for 638 days, which puts it in the top 10% of oldest beta sites (58 / 507), and from some quick math, far exceeds the other beta sites in that decile, along the metrics sites are specifically measured against:

¹

Not only is ELL far and away better than its peers along every metric, these measures have been improving steadily since inception, and so if sites are reviewed every 90 days, these impressive figures should have been reviewed seven times.

So what's holding us up?

Questions

• Is English Language Learners up for imminent graduation?
• If not, is the Q:A ratio really holding up the graduation of ELL?
• If not, what is holding up the graduation?
• What can we, the community, proactively do to expedite the graduation of ELL to a full site?

Since waiting patiently hasn't yet borne fruit, I'm looking for an active strategy to push ELL through to graduation soon².

---

¹ ^{Chart data pulled from the list of oldest beta sites; red is ELL, blue is the average of all the other sites which have had a similar amount of time to establish themselves. The y-axis has been normalized by the published "excellent" threshold for each metric, but only the ratio of red:blue is relevant for this discussion.}

² ^{Obligatory disclaimer: one reason for my fervor is I'm an active user on EL&U, and I can't migrate questions from English learners there to this site until it comes out of beta.}

Answer 1

I would really like the staff take a stance on this, because it seems to me it's just some personal preferences - let's compare to recently launched yet another CMS site

6.6 vs 28.7 questions per day.

80% vs 98% answered

267/3,502 vs 720 avid users, 12,319 total users

1.6 vs 1.8 answer ratio

1,146 vs 23,632 visits/day

Answer 2

I infer from Robert Cartaino's post on MSE that we're waiting on a full site design.

There are very few minimum criteria1 for when a site becomes eligible for graduation, so the actual deciding factors are still largely subjective. We are generally looking for a robust site with a steady stream of high-quality quantity questions, enough to keep folks interested in the site on a sustained basis. We look at the turnover rate to see if the community has attracted an avid, core group of users. We look for an active and functional governance; i.e. does the community respond to and act on meta issues as they come up? Is their purpose and their scope pretty rock solid, or are there issues that still need to be resolved? We also look at the viability of holding a functional election (an intrinsic part of graduation). So generally speaking, we look for a site that has a sustained level of activity that all-but-guarantees the site can maintain a healthy pattern of growth for the foreseeable future.

I think it's safe to say ELL meets these criteria.

Sending a site to the "graduation queue" and getting a design published are currently two different things. We recently hired some fantastic new designers to help clear the backlog, but there is a still about 9 sites waiting for a design, last I checked. But site designs aren't completed on a production line either. A designer works on them as they are able (amidst all the bug reports and feature requests that are interspersed throughout their workflow). And which sites are completed first simply depends on who is available and how much work it takes.

We are in the graduation queue already, so I presume this is the reason for the delay.