Congratulations, you're no longer in Beta!

Question

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.

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!

Answer 1

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

I would like to know more about this, like when and why and how etc.

@Catija's answers (from comments)

When - I don't know, but we're not capable of hosting 29 elections simultaneously so we have to space them out at the very least.

Why - we believe in our community-moderated sites and we recognize that the mods appointed (or elected) in the earliest days of a site have put a lot of time and effort but pro-tem mods understand that they have to run when the site graduates. This is our way of allowing the newer users of the site to weigh-in on how it's moderated.

I'm not sure how to answer How. It would be identical to other graduation elections. All mods who wish to keep their position must nominate themselves and run in the election, which must be competitive (slots + 1 nominees). As far as I can tell, there's no reason to deviate from this format initially.

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_{Original question}

I didn't find a satisfying answer in the MSE post.

I know that that belongs to graduation and read this official answer, where it's explained how it usually works. During private and public beta, stacks are run by appointed moderators. There are only elections after graduation ("Once a community reaches a tipping point where the quality remains high, the community is engaged and self-sustaining, and the traffic growth reaches a critical mass that assures continued success for the foreseeable future, we can start the process of graduation.").

But these graduations are quite different from the site launching process described there. We only have elected moderators one elected and two appointed moderators (the last election was in May 2018). Having also witnessed elections on full sites (The Workplace, Movies & TV), I do not see much of a difference between these elections. Also, the graduation happened after a long time (8 years or so?) and at a rather arbitrarily chosen point in time (I mean it's not like Parenting.SE suddenly reached some specific goal. Actually, not much changed here).

That's why I'm curious about whether you will follow that standard procedure and how. The graduation didn't follow the standard procedure, and there's no need to democratically legitimize moderators who were "just" appointed.