We're graduating!

Question

Retrocomputing Stack Exchange is leaving beta on the 16th of December. Here's the official announcement.

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As the (somewhat out of date) Help Center article says: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've done pretty well at this, I think.

• 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 tem moderators are doing less than half the work.
• 96% of our questions are answered, with an average of 2.6 answers per question.
• We've got over 3000 visits per day. (3142, at time of writing.)

Apart from making an FAQ, and the (hotly debated) 10 questions per day metric, we meet all the classic criteria for graduation.

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 customisation)

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 sd-card, military and tracker.
• Approve (or reject) the pending tag synonyms
• Make sure the /help/on-topic page is up to date. (You can edit it here.)
• Make an index for the scope questions and comment discussions, so it's easier for new users to look up whether something's on topic.
• Write some faq-proposed Q&A pairs, or edit existing questions into FAQs. (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.
• 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.
• Visit The BBS, and give the Annoying Robot some company. Maybe even have a party?

Answer 1

From the central Meta post:

In the past, we were able to offer a custom site design to graduated sites. Although site redesigns aren’t happening right now, we have a shared interest internally in experimenting with ways to get this or similar benefits back. We know the sites that lost their “Beta” label in 2019 are still waiting for a redesign, too. We hope that some sort of design love (or perhaps theme customization) will come in the future, but we don't have concrete details of what this will look like or a timeline of when this will happen.

Since we are apparently not getting a custom theme any time soon, I decided to celebrate by creating a tiny user style sheet to customise the header.

.site-header {
    font-family: 'Pet Me 64', 'C64 Pro', monospace;
    text-transform: uppercase;
    --theme-header-link-color: #5090d0;
    --theme-header-background-color: #181090;
}

.site-header .site-header--link {
    font-weight: normal !important;
    font-size: 24px;
}

.site-header .site-header--link::after {
    content: '█';
}

For Meta:

.site-header {
    --theme-header-link-color: silver;
    --theme-header-background-color: black;
}

Install it with Stylus. You will have to also install the fonts Pet Me or C64 Pro yourself, as I have nowhere to point a @font-face declaration to.

Not much of a change, actually, and not a design I put too much thought to. It’s just something quick-and-dirty to make the site look a little less bland. I had some other ideas, but I decided not to spend the effort on them just yet.